I can kind of understand not wanting anything to do with doctors. I didn't for years myself. Although, we cannot diagnose you here. Even people who are professionals or psych students or what have you cannot without seeing you face to face. It's tough.

Dissociation is highly possible. Whether it is a dissociative disorder, I don't know. I dissociate sometimes. By this, I mean that... I separate from myself. Not in relation to one of the disorders on the dissociative disorder spectrum. I have sat within a circle of family members - people whom I've known all my life - and felt like I did not know who they were at all. I was still moderately consciously aware. But it felt like I had separated from myself and was watching myself from a distance. And like I had been a different person. I haven't had an episode like that in a while. For some time, they were frequent. I'm not sure what caused them. I haven't yet brought them up to my pdoc. But I do wonder if it was related to the dog attack I experienced a few years ago. As the episodes began around that time and just ceased when I slowly started to better understand what happened.

The thing with dissociation is that it can be tied to a lot of mental illnesses. Even people without a mental illness dissociate from time to time. It's when it becomes an interference with your life that something may be up. It could be related to another one, it could be a dissociative disorder. We cannot say accurately. But dissociation occurs for some people who have depression, and since depressive episodes are part of bipolar disorder it is possible that it could be that.