"Who wants a change?"

As we all know, Michael is almost as bad at dealing with change as Elly is. From being told that he's going to be a big brother to pulling excuses out of his ass to explain why it is that having to buy the Tiny Train House would be the worst possible thing of all worse possible things, any deviation from a norm that exposes him to any sort of risk of loss is seen not as an opportunity to shake of the shackles of complacency but as a means of tormenting and humiliating him. As I've said before, the origin of this tendency has as its basis the execrable way in which the Pattersons smugly failed to include him in the whole 'becoming a big brother and moving house' process. What seems to have happened is pretty much the same thing that happened to April during the Housening: the two of them blanked the Hell out on how their behaviour made him feel because they bought into the myth of childhood resilience. Add in the fact that Elly deliberately seems to have misinterpreted his need to feel as if she still belonged in the worst possible light and John had the consistent need to ignore Mike until he himself is inconvenienced (as well as the fact that nothing Mike can do is really good enough for them) and, as I've said too many times, we end up with a little boy who thinks that people only change things to cruelly mock him and remind him that not only does he not count, he deserves to be kicked in the fact and laughed at for even daring to want to be happy. The end result of the Pattersons not admitting to themselves that they'd raised a man crippled by pessimism and passivity is that they don't get why he never seems to want to roll with the punches.