Riverbird

Offended might not be the right word, but it's the best I can come up with for now...

I work at a children's home. Nearly all of our kids have been through severe abuse and neglect at the hands of their families, and nearly all of those families have a long history of substance abuse. So, as you might imagine, my coworkers have a pretty ugly image of addicts/alcoholics. I get that. What frustrates me is the snide comments that I'm hearing almost constantly from people who have no experience with addiction. It's hard to give detail without giving out more info than I can online...but there's a lot of blaming, talking down about addicts, and just general negative comments.

I've been sober for almost 3 years and am extremely proud of my sobriety. I'm not ashamed of my past either. I went through a lot, and made some bad decisions along the way, but thankfully I also found people that supported me and helped me through. So when I start hearing these comments I want to jump up and scream that not all addicts are like that, and that they can change when given help and support. But it's nearly impossible to find the right words, because I don't want to be in the position of defending abusive parents, nor do I want my own addiction issues to be known at work. I can deal with it if it did get found out, but as you can imagine it's not really an addict/alcoholic friendly environment there.

There's one other sober person there that I know of (actually met her in AA and then we somewhat randomly ended up both working in the same place) but the rest of the staff drinks quite a bit and is always talking about going out to drink after work. Anyway, I can't decide if I should say something or just keep my mouth shut...and either way I need to figure out a way to make peace with it in my own head so i'm not constantly taking it personally. Any thoughts?