I myself haven't been diagnosed with this disorder and I'm not aware of any personality switching or amnesia, and nobody have had told me that sometimes I behave like a different person.

But still I wonder if I have been dangerously close to getting it and if some of my current issues might be caused by this.

I'm an introvert person and therefore taking everything very personally and seriously. So when I was a kid and my parents had loud fights because of my father being an alcohol addict. I felt deep emotional discomfort and conflicting feelings towards my father whom I liked because in general he was a good person and never raised a hand on anyone. I just didn't like the person whom he became when he came home drunk - so weak, with slurred speech, helpless, bad smelling, lying on the floor and cursing himself for getting drunk again. And my mom shouting at him and begging him to stop drinking with his "friends" .... and again... almost every other day.

So, to somehow resolve these emotions I hid in my room and played an adventure story with my toys. In that adventure story I always had an older man, who I imagined to be my "real father" (although he was older and could be an imaginary grandfather). I have never met my actual grandfathers - they both died before I was born and at time I didn't know any real person who could replace my imaginary old man.

The plot of my adventure stories always was about a boy and a father overcoming lots of obstacles, fighting monsters and whatnot to find each other. On one hand, it felt so wrong like betraying my father because I was imagining to have a different father. On the other hand, it provided some warm and fuzzy feeling of protection, even if I knew that it's just a fantasy and I always had to play both the role of the boy and the "father". It was like a very conscious and deliberate splitting myself and pretending to be two persons at the same time, but not splitting enough to actually develop those two parts as completely separate personalities.

I have always had better connection with people who are much older than me. As a kid I often used to spit out some philosophical phrases that amused my relatives. Of course, my siblings laughed at me for being such a "smartass". Who knows, maybe my "old imaginary father" had much deeper influences on me. Or maybe it was just because I was an introvert and liked to reflect upon my own thoughts and emotions.

Anyway, I suspect that if I wouldn't play out my inner emotions and put them into the adventure stories, I might be split into these two personalities and I would have that old man living in my head forever.

Even today, being 38 eight years old, I feel strong emotional connections with people who in some ways remind me of that old man - who are somewhat old fashioned, slightly authoritative but gentle and intelligent. And sometimes when I have a moment of my "introvert melancholic blues", I still internally apply this "roleplay" technique - I return to my childhood memories and imagine how would that old man comfort me and make me feel accepted and protected. Or I imagine myself being that man and having capabilities of dealing with every possible problem I have in my life. That's still just an imagination, and very often I feel very sad that I don't have such a protector in my real life.

And to some degree I blame that for my homosexual kinks because I don't have any sexual attractions to anyone at all except the people who remind me of that old man; but my sexual attractions completely fade out as soon as I find out some differences between the real person and my "imaginary old man". Of course, nobody can be as perfect as an imaginary person, thus I usually end up being asexual.

So, my question to those who have experience and knowledge about Dissociative Disorders: does my story sound any familiar? Was I close to being split?