The communication axioms

One of the more annoying things we have to bear witness to is that Elly doesn't actually like telling people with the power to shout her down what she actually thinks. Just as in real life, the people around Lynn have to piece together what she means because she appears to have been raised in an environment that feared a bullshit apocalypse of being blubbering Continentals who didn't know what shame was and thus actually talked about their problems instead of bottling them up for fear of what the neighbours might think because sense, common decency and sanity is NOT FOR ENGLISHMEN, Elly seems to have come up with an exaggerated dread of what someone might do to punish her for oppressing him with her hurt feelings. This is a woman who wanted to be beaten up for a bent fender because it would make her feel better and restore the balance so it's obvious that the reason that John has to play guessing games is due to

Axiom 1w:

Elly cannot and will not express her honest assessment of what's bothering her with someone with sufficient status to shout her down.

This need of hers to walk around looking wounded and angry all the time is made all the worse by the survival of her inability to quite realize that people either don't actually know what they did to upset her and the fact that she might not actually have anything to be upset about. This means that the family lives in fear not only of the volcanic temper she doesn't admit exists but also of her being in a tearing rage over less than nothing again. Since she'd sooner admit that her mother was right about her imaginary pot belly vanishing if she didn't slouch around like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders than confess that she has a hair-trigger temper and a lack of interest in figuring out what's actually happened, the characters have to contend with

Axiom 1x:

1) Elly makes her life worse by not actually talking about what's bothering her because she wastes her life being pointlessly upset when a simple yes-or-no question would save her time, worry and effort.

2) Because Marian never shuts up about the mistakes Elly's made, Elly has no interest in doing this because she believes that admitting she's wrong is a humiliation from which she'll never be allowed to recover.