The conscience-reassurance complex.

The interesting thing that I've noticed about this arc is that we're a week or two away from Elly saying something amazingly insensitive and stupid about Ted and Irene. While she defends her idiotic remark by insisting that getting involved in someone else's mess like a dimwit is the best way to help Connie, she later repents of her actions because that awful voice people call a conscience calls her an abrasive dunderhead who refuses to learn from experience.

The reason that I find that interesting is that I cannot help but contrast it with the end of the "Elly bans television because she blames it for her children cursing despite it being fairly obvious that her own habit of using language that would scandalize Lenny Bruce is the actual problem" arc in which Connie essentially tells her "Go on and blame someone else for your own stupidity like you always do. It's cool." This form of emotional support is also why Connie smilingly enables Elly's delusion that her children keep their room messy and listen to headache music to defy and torment her and not as a means of defending themselves from having their living space picked over by a lunatic who wants to erase their personalities.

Simply put, the reason that Elly loves having Connie around is that she is as ready to blame her children for her own catastrophic total failure as a wife, mother, daughter, citizen and multicellular carbon-based life form as Elly herself is. This means that she never need hear awful things like "Hey, dummy! Do you know what 'picking your battles' means?" or "Hey, stupid!!! Maybe you should actually listen to April about this Kortney person!" or even "Given that the more you shout and threaten, the less the kids are willing to talk to you or listen to what you have to say, wouldn't it be a good idea to calm down, quit acting like you're under siege and realize that maybe you've read them all wrong all this time?" It's easier listening to Connie and her "Go forth and be a shrill, belligerent, judgmental and ignorant wacko" because being stupid means never having to say "I'm sorry."

On never bringing problems on themselves.

The whole mess with John blowing up at Mike for not being 'appreciative' enough reminds me that the Pattersons aren't just allergic to the realization that they've got a lot of anger and a need to crush people. There's something else that the sort of protective stupidity Orwell called "crimestop" protects them from having to realize: the fact that they bring most of their problems on themselves.

As an example of this tendency, let's watch what happens when Mike behaves like a surly, demeaning and insulting jackass to Liz and she decides she's had quite enough of his being a pissy little nitwit who can't get over having to actually share like a 'nobody.' You'd assume that the sane thing to do would be to apologize and admit that you're out of line but you aren't a Patterson. His response to the least bit of frustration of his desires and criticism of his being a punk-ass little bitch is to turn into a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic who wants to pulverize her for daring to say that he should treat her like a human being if he wants results. Instead of listening to a voice telling him that he's letting himself be made a huge, ugly fool of when playing it cool would make his life better, the festering boil on the buttocks of humanity lets his goat get got some more and blunders his stupid way into causing property damage because of his overweening and stupid need to make Liz pay for calling him a repellent ding-dong who should behave better. This results in the "unfair" punishment of having to get a summer job because, for reasons he doesn't understand, his cruel parents think that he has too much time on his hands and needs to learn to behave responsibly.

The reason that he doesn't understand this is that while Liz still remembers every time she lived in fear of his malice and selfishness, our boy simply can't remember being a geyser of mindless hostility trying to smash her flat for the 'crime' of being in his way. Oh, he might have said the odd cruel thing but kids are resilient, childhood doesn't matter, time doesn't exist and nothing is ever his fault and he doesn't make trouble for himself by being a self-serving dimwit who never learns a God-damned thing from experience because doing so would mean that he has to humiliate himself forever and live a masochistic life where he has to grovel endlessly to the people he's offended. The idea that people would move on if he makes amends is not one he or any other Patterson can entertain because, well, it would mean that their own desire to that end is a horrifying anomaly that makes them outliers.