Eric Minton - Its Not You, Its Everything : What Our Pain Reveals about the Anxious Pursuit of the Good Life

Praise for Its Not You, Its Everything

With Its Not You, Its 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. He exemplifies this holy task by showing us that all justice is relational and that we ourselves did not create the infrastructures of toxic ideas about self, others, and God many of us have inherited. 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 Lifes Too Short to Pretend Youre Not Religious

In Its Not You, Its Everything, Eric Minton presents a compassionate and uncompromising assessment of the forces driving our spiritual anxiety. Knitting together psychological and structural reasons for a culture engulfed in despair, Eric shows us how the dam of our discontent cannot be plastered over with therapeutic moments and marketplace distractions. It will take stronger stuff to pull apart the blockage of our personal and communal destruction. Its Not You, Its Everything guides us toward questions that peel back the source of our discontent. In this book for people who cant take much more, Minton offers us a hope with weighthope we can hold on to.

Melissa Florer-Bixler, pastor and author of How to Have an Enemy and Fire by Night

In Its Not You, Its 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: white evangelical American Christianity and the ecosystem that keeps it obscured and impervious to remedy. Then, through his stories and keen insights, he shows us a way forward.

Lisa Coln 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 with teens and youth to offer hope to us regardless of our age. Challenging us to view our anxiety and depression from a new angle, he illuminates a path beyond the hypercapitalist morass in which we find ourselves today. I highly recommend this insightful book to caregivers of all stripes, religious or not, and 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 Its Not You, Its 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

Eric Minton

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

ITS NOT YOU, ITS EVERYTHING

What Our Pain Reveals about the Anxious Pursuit of the Good Life

Copyright 2022 Eric Minton. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked (NET) are from the NET Bible copyright 1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. http://netbible.com All rights reserved.

Some names, details, and identities have been changed or significantly obscured to protect individuals privacy.

Cover image: Stacey__M/shutterstock

Cover design: Olga Grlic

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7191-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7192-1

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

That mother&*@%er stole my brand, and I swear to God Im fixing to go off on his ass if he tries to get on Facebook Live with my shit is how a teenager angrily addressed me a few years ago. This was after he was forcibly recused from math class at the underfunded high school where I once worked as a psychotherapist. If you are unfamiliar with the way language works for some of our youngest citizens and dont comprehend what that first sentence means, please utilize the same skills you employ at contentious Thanksgiving dinner conversations and during episodes of The Bachelor and simply pay attention to the pain, because the pain is trying to tell us something.

In this case, the pain could be better understood as the extreme angst of a student who has had a peer steal his brand (way of being, style of humor, mode of speech) and go live on the internet as if it were the aforementioned thiefs own brand. While I may not remember everything about my fumbling travails through adolescence in the early aughts, I am fairly certain that copyright infringement wasnt yet part of the landscape of my own acne-filled and hormone-fueled existence. I do, however, recognize the pain.

In the face of teenage meltdowns, it can be easy for us adults to find ourselves muttering something unhelpful about the good old days, that things will probably get better and that angst is what adolescence is and has always been about since modern economic theory began categorizing these almost-adults as their own consumer bloc in the early 1900s. However, before dismissing them to bed without dinner because you will not speak to your mother that way, I would argue that teenagers are tellingstrike that, yelling atus the uncomfortable truth about who we are as a nation, what we believe in, and what we value most in this world.

Whenever we find ourselves offended or confused by adolescent behavior, it isnt just the behavior itself we find offensive but rather the ways in which the anxious, performative, technology-addled, and sometimes narcissistic or status-driven lives of our teenagers say the quiet part of being an American out loud. And the truth isnt pretty. Im saying that all this aired pain might actually be expressing the truth about what it feels like to try to survive in America right now. So instead of talking them out of their tantrums, maybe we should instead start listening to our teenagers because they might be right to be upset.