It's Not You, It's Everything: What Our Pain Reveals about the Anxious Pursuit of the Good Life
If we can agree on anything, it's that we are not okay. Our culture is reeling from the ravages of a global pandemic, a precipitous rise in depression and anxiety, suffocating debt, white supremacy, hypercapitalism, and a virulent political animus--to name a few.
But what if it's not us? What if it's . . . well, everything? What if trying to conform to a sick culture is actually making us sick?
It's Not You, It's Everything is a timely and incisive inquiry into the anxious pursuit of happiness at all costs. Psychotherapist and former pastor Eric Minton claims that the pernicious melding of capitalism and Christianity means a world of competition, perfection, and scarcity disguised as self-help and self-care. Rather than shaming, silencing, or medicating away our disappointment at not having obtained the happiness we were promised, however, Minton posits a radical alternative. In an impertinent, droll, yet pastoral voice, Minton suggests that our "not-okayness" will require rethinking everything we thought we knew about God, depression, the economy, culture, education, technology, and happiness.
Our angst--and that of our children and teenagers--is telling us the truth about the kind of world we've created. By naming all the ways we're not okay, we move away from fear and shame and toward love, and trust, and trustworthiness. We'll need nothing less than hip-hop, Mr. Rogers, liberation theology, and Jesus to get us there. But on the other side of our pain is a radical "okayness" that might just set us free.
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Eric Minton is a writer, ordained Baptist minister, and psychotherapist specializing in marriage and family therapy. He has a family therapy practice in Knoxville, Tennessee, and provides coaching and consultation for pastors, nonprofit leaders, businesspeople, and institutions, helping them foster better ways of living, working, and serving together. Minton's work has appeared in Sojourners, Geez Magazine, Baptist News Global, and Red Letter Christians.
"This penetrating debut by Baptist minister-turned-psychotherapist Minton invites readers to slow down and resist the pressure to be more 'popular, marketable, or productive'....Minton's astute observations about how capitalism drives unending cycles of want ('Discontentment is both capitalism's oxygen and its carbon dioxide') succeed in bringing a candid class consciousness to Christian self-help. This unorthodox guide blends humor, theology, and social commentary to potent effect." ----Publishers Weekly
"With It's Not You, It's Everything, Eric Minton gives us a profound gift, inviting us into a genuinely therapeutic space where we can regard our own stretched-to-the-limit bandwidth with care, compassion, and good humor. There is difficult work to be done, but we can meet the task of seeing ourselves clearly and candidly. It can even be a joy." --David Dark, author of Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious
"In It's Not You, It's Everything, Eric Minton presents a compassionate and uncompromising assessment of the forces driving our spiritual anxiety and guides us toward questions that peel back the source of our discontent. In this book for people who can't take much more, Minton offers us a hope with weight--hope we can hold on to." --Melissa Florer-Bixler, pastor and author of How to Have an Enemy and Fire by Night
"In It's Not You, It's Everything, you will find an honest, congenial, and instructive book. Eric Minton is vulnerable, sharing both his mental health journey and his reckoning with the faulty folk religion of his youth. Then, through his stories and keen insights, he shows us a way forward." --Lisa Colón DeLay, spiritual director, author of The Wild Land Within, and host of the Spark My Muse podcast
"With a distinctive earthy wit and wisdom, Eric Minton draws upon his pastoral and therapeutic experience to offer hope to us all. Challenging us to turn our anxiety and depression back out into the world, he illuminates a path beyond the hypercapitalist morass in which we find ourselves today. I highly recommend this insightful book to anyone trying to deal with this crazy world as best as they can." --Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, author of Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age
"In It's Not You, It's Everything, Eric Minton sets out to delineate the ways the modern life does not support our thriving as spiritual, emotional, and embodied human beings, and to offer us a bold alternative way of being. He succeeds on both counts. With humor, vulnerability, and reference to a multitude of writers, activists, and scholars, Minton digs deep into what it would take for all of us to actually be okay." --Jessica Kantrowitz, author of The Long Night, 365 Days of Peace, and Blessings for the Long Night
