Unhappy with Life

Friday, October 30, 2009 - 12:25 PM   Recently, life has not being going as well as I would have liked it to be. I have not been feeling well physically or mentally, and the combination of the two has made me feel as if I am being torn apart.   My dissatisfaction with living in Denver, Colorado has been growing with leaps and bounds. To say that, "I hate living here" would have to be the understatement of the year. It is difficult for me to live in a place where I have no friends. It is a problem without an easy solution, but I am still searching for one.   I have begun talking with my psychologist, Dr. Martin, about the situation. It is my impression that she is trying to learn as much about why I do not like it here as possible. Family has a lot to do with how I feel.   When my sister, brother-in-law, and their two children moved here in the early 80s, they were looking forward to the move primarily because my brother lived in Boulder, which is located less than an hour away. They later told me that they had envisioned having a life here whereby they would be seeing my brother frequently, but that never actually happened.   For me, it is almost the same thing with a little difference. I thought that I would be seeing a good deal of both my brother and sister along with their families. That never came to pass. While I see more of my sister and her family than I do of my brother and his, it still leaves a lot to be desired. Both my brother and sister are retired, and they spend much of their time seeing friends and being with their children and grandchildren. I often feel as if I have been left out in the cold.   At the beginning of our family counseling, I had hopes that it would help bring all of us together. Most of those hopes have now been dashed since I have begun seeing different sides of both my brother and my sister. I fully realize that we are not the same as we once were when we were children, but I now feel as though we somehow managed to become more estranged from one another during the ensuing years.   I am no longer under the illusion that I will be fully reunited with a "happy family" such as the ones we used to see on television so many years ago. That is not the case, and it never will be. Dr. Martin told me that such thinking was not realistic.