@Cold Root Beer I can't quote your excellent post but it got me thinking: How did Fat get like this? He can't have been quite this awful to start with or he'd never have had a kid or a writing career. Something broke him.
I want to talk about anger problems. Anger problems often derive from abuse and trauma, but the mechanism is different to that which most people suppose - it's not that someone is angry about what happened to them (though they might be) and that just makes them angry all the time. Trauma causes anger in a more nuanced and complex way.
Let's say something bad happened to you. Maybe daddy touched you. Maybe the kids at school shoved you into a locker. Maybe you were in an abusive relationship with parents or a partner. Maybe you were a cop or a soldier and saw things nobody should see. Whatever it was, it was awful. The worst thing you have ever experienced. It was painful. It was utterly disempowering and humiliating. You felt nothing but constant fear, anxiety and growing panic, 24/7. You were utterly powerless, and someone else was able to exploit you, violate you, hurt you, humiliate you, whenever they wanted and there was nothing you could do to stop it. Maybe it went on for years. That's the kind of thing that doesn't just break your mind - it crushes your very soul. Eventually, you realise that your life is at stake. If the abusers don't kill you, you might just do it yourself just to make it stop. And it's at that point, because your ego is shattered ,your id takes over. And your id has one objective - keep you alive. And it has one way to keep you alive, and it tells you:
Nobody is ever going to make you feel that way again, no matter what. They will pay. They will ALL pay.
At that point you are kept alive by the sheer animalistic rage of your lizard brain. You refuse to fucking die, you refuse to let this defeat you. And there is a good chance it will work (and for those for whom it doesn't work, natural selection weeds them out). For a period of time, anger becomes your vital, driving force. And the id loves that shit, because you're alive, and you don't feel those feelings any more. Rage is better than what you felt before.
Anything is better than what you felt before.
But this coping mechanism can easily become maladaptive. Because it can result in any conflict, any situation in which you might be conceivably be embarrassed or humiliated triggers (the actual proper use of that word) your id into taking over.
No no no no no, says the id,
I'm not going to be humiliated again. I will NEVER be humiliated again. ANYTHING is better than that. They can't humiliate you if you kill them first! Kill! Kill! Kill! And when the id says "anything" is better than feeling those feelings again, it really means
anything. Getting into a fight is better than feeling that way again. Getting fired is better. Going to jail is better. And, apparently, spending the entire ball game that you went to with your wife fighting with people on Twitter is better than that, too. Any situation that could conceivably result in loss of face or appearing submissive to someone else, be that real or imagined, causes your rational mind to shut down and that rage, the rage that sustained you, the rage without which you would be dead, the rage to which you owe your continued existence, takes over. And of course in a civilised society, acting out that rage, even if it's just verbally, has severely negative consequences, many of which are disempowering and humiliating. So you feel those feelings anyway, those feelings that you would rather do anything than feel again. And all that does is remind your id of what you're trying to avoid, so it
just rages harder. That's not a rational response, but we're talking about an aspect of the human psyche that evolved when we were swinging from the trees, and tearing the other despised proto-hominid limb from limb was a much more effective way of dealing with their shit than it is now that we have laws, cops, and Twitter. And so that primitive survival mechanism loops back around, making you even more angry and irrational, and on a state of constant alert for the slightest signs of anyone or anything that might be a threat. You're in permanent "fight or flight" but you are
done running away, so that narrows your options down to "fight". So you fight. This is the downward spiral that Pat is in, and he's too narcissistic to seek help or even realise this isn't normal.
So what was it that tipped Pat over the edge? He was always egotistical and pompous, but he wasn't this
broken. He could function in society. He did things all day other than fight.
My best guess is it was the collapse of his first marriage, the termination of his parental rights and the speed at which his first wife started a relationship with PCJ - which may well have started before the divorce. To have your wife cheat on you is always humiliating, but for someone like Pat, someone whose entire sense of self-worth is based on a macho view of masculinity in which his animalistic man-power is his greatest asset, it must have been
eviscerating. Pat having another man steal his woman and his child would be as bad for someone like him as being raped or tortured would be for the rest of us. I bet that's when he snapped. He found a quiet, broken woman with low self-esteem who he married pretty much solely because he thought she'd never leave him - and if my theory about their relationship is right, he will damn well stop her doing it at any cost. But Nikki doesn't fill that void. She's not enough to replace what he lost. Neither are the guns, or the motorbike, or his Mustang.
He's still not enough of a man, and that thought gnaws at him all the time at the back of his mind, and every time he entertains it, the
rage comes back.
So he can't let the tiniest thing go. That would be submitting to somebody else. He had to submit to somebody else in court once. He lost his wife and his daughter that day. I bet they smirked at him, and for the first time, he properly
boiled with anger, and has never stopped since. That's why he always has to get the last word. The Rage won't let him do otherwise. That's why he denies everything, to the point of absurdity. As far as his lizard brain is concerned, admitting to the tiniest error or admitting that he's in any way wrong would be like being in that courtroom all over again. He never, EVER wants to feel that again. But because he is both stupid and too narcissistic to realise that he needs to reign that rage in rather than give in to it all the time, he loses to the aTalkers over and over. He feels that humiliation all over again. So he does the only thing he remembers how to do - he keeps fighting a battle that he always loses, stuck in an endless loop. His total and all-consuming primal fear of being humiliated causes him to act in ways that result in him being humiliated. Forever.
Also, he's fat.