I think one thing this chapter has repeatedly tried to explore is how some traumas people experience can inexplicably make them feel like THEY are the ones who are to blame and that the things they experienced and the people they are make them less than human–or rather, less able to connect with other humans. And under the premise that having connections with other people and being able to have connections is one of the most essential part of being human–if the experiences you went through (without any choice) force you into a situation where you are less able to do that, it’s probably a very painful situation to be in.

In that context, I think I personally don’t see it as Alison knowing better than Patrick how to handle trauma she never had to experience. In fact your problems with what’s happened are exactly the same problems I had/have with Alison’s whole relationship/exchange with Cleaver. Alison had all the upper hand in that chapter and the whole scenario had a discomforting feeling for me.

However, in this specific situation, the comic has made attempts to communicate that the way Patrick has internalized his trauma is by structuring his identity around it. I mean…kind of understandable considering how much of it involves his ability to one-sidedly read other people. So less of a Alison thinks she knows what’s better for Patrick and more of a the authors think they know what’s better for Patrick and they have given us some reasons why. A strategy of compartmentalizing and moving on wouldn’t work because some traumas can end up defining someone’s identity no matter how hard they might try to have it not. And for Patrick, so much of his pain comes from something he’s born with that he has no control over.

So when Alison says he needs to open that door and confront it, it kind of plays into the trope of ‘you need to confront your past! Get catharsis! release’, but it also doesn’t, because the chapter didn’t frame that as the positive endgame. That trope became a trope in the first place because many creators who use it forget that the whole point to talking about the past and confronting it isn’t usually about how it’ll make you feel better–it’s what comes afterwards. Once you understand better why you’re upset and put it into words, even when it seems obvious, it’s what comes next that’s actually important. For some, it’s owning it and gaining power over something that’s hurt you by framing it through your own experiences and perspectives. Because then it’s no longer something that’s just happened to you with you as the passive receiver. By talking about it to someone else, you are using the very thing that might have made you feel an outsider and and isolated and using that to connect emotionally with someone. There is power in that for some people.

In the context of this chapter, Patrick literally perceives the world differently from other people. He experiences things slightly different, but it’s revealed that he’s terrified that those differences permanently cut him off from ever being human, because of what those experiences has led him to do and to become. In this context, Alison telling Patrick that he needs to open the door is to reach an endgame where Alison and Patrick can both understand exactly WHAT Patrick has based his identity of incompleteness and inhumanness on. In the comic we see that Patrick reveres (and probably envies) the way Alison was raised. She had the family that Patrick might have desperately wished he had, and as a result, HE feels as if her judgment and perspective is so important. Whether that’s true is debatable, but it’s PATRICK who probably feels like:

‘I can’t trust my own judgment about how much of a monster I am, but Alison had the ideal family background. She is both someone who’s inhuman like me, AND she’s also someone is the most human I know.’

Not only is she the best bet in his life who can see the things he’s done and understand exactly what those experiences felt like, she is also the best bet from the ‘human’ side of things to validate or invalidate his humanity. I imagine that his other friends and compatriots all came from dysfunctional homes like he did. Sometimes, people do need that empathy from someone with a completely different background, because it really does go a long way to help remind you that the experiences that have made you more awkward or maladaptive in situations that other people have no problems with does not make you any less human.

And just my two cents, if people are trying to good will hunting you or something, idk. that’s just gross. Like you should be the one who gets to choose what to talk about. If people are pressuring you to do that, then I kind of feel like it’s 100% legitimate to feel like those people care more about how much they can help and how good of a person they are than they care about actually helping you.

That might not be true–they might genuinely not realize being pushy can just add on the flames of pain, and there are cases where being pushy can be helpful, but even if they did genuinely care about helping you more than they do about how good it’ll make them feel in return, it’s still perfectly natural to feel angry and want them to go f’ off. I mean….there’s more of me than I like to admit that wishes Cleaver just told Alison to go f’ off.

sorry I”m rambling. tldr; I think there should be a lot more debate on whether this whole thing was really involuntary. There were a lot of hints in the chapter that suggest that Patrick desperately needed this connection with Alison for years but didn’t know how to ask for it and it has escalated to this point more as an inevitability. On an emotional side, I kind of feel like you can deeply want something and be terrified of it all at once. It’s how you portray that contradiction in a story where it can become problematic. I kind of feel like saying that what happened to Patrick was definitely involuntary kind of takes a bit of agency away from him that this chapter attempted very hard to give him.