Hi, I'm new and wanted to get some perspective on a problem until I see my therapist next week.

I've been working at my office for 2 years and there is this woman who makes my days there miserable. I think of her as the ringmaster of the office gossip mill. Without her, the office atmosphere would be a thousand times more enjoyable--as her vacations and days off have proved.

She is 60-something, and is the head assistant to our chief and enjoys projecting a kindly, grandmotherly personality. But in reality, she is overly critical of everyone to the point where it seems like she enjoys it like a hobby. She'll bad-mouth X behind their back to Y, and then bad-mouth Y behind their back to X, all the while being outwardly nice to both! I see it as two-faced and hypocritical, especially because it seems she'll go to any length to find something to criticize. She finds the most inconsequential thing (often something that's none of her business anyway) and blows it way out of proportion to everyone she talks to--and she makes it a point to talk to EVERYONE. She'll put it across in such an indignant way (she uses the grandmother thing to her advantage) that people largely believe her. She does it so often that after 2 years, I've concluded she's the kind of person who can only build herself up by tearing others down. As in, "Can you believe so and so said or did this horrible thing, what a horrible person they are! *I* would never be like that..." It's like she thrives on other people's perception of her and NEEDS their approval, even if she just bad-mouthed them to someone else. Basic self-esteem and insecurity issues, I guess, only it's at everyone else's expense, as if she's perfect and beyond reproach.

She also has this maddening habit of being passive-aggressively "confrontational." For example, there is an office supply of sweetener, cream and coffee that coffee drinkers pay for. I bring my own coffee (I like it much stronger), but use the sweetener on occasion and pay some change when I do. She, however, must think--or want everyone else to think--I am stealing sweetener, for God's sake. Today, I walk in to warm my coffee in the microwave as she is eating lunch. So she yells out to someone else on the other side of a cubicle, "How long has it been since we just refilled the sweetener? There's only 5 packets left, it must have grown legs and walked out of here!" Right in front of me, an obvious reference to me since no one else was around and she was just eating her lunch before I came in. I knew what she was doing, but walked out, said nothing, tried to ignore her, and fumed privately at my desk. I was so mad I was visualizing kicking her head clean off, cartoon-style, and possibly punching her in her spiteful mouth. And I'm not a violent person by nature, but man, she made me seethe.

The only way I've coped with it is to ignore her because I get the feeling that "changing" her is not an option. So far, I avoid talking or being around her at all (I'm sure that's another reason she tries so hard to pick on me), but that obviously doesn't stop her from trying to piss me off. I'd rather just find a way to directly say that I refuse to participate in her tangled web of manipulations; like Glinda the Good Witch, I want to get across that she has no powers where I am concerned. I do not want to stoop to her level and "get back at her" or even give her the satisfaction of arguing with her, I just want to be strong and collected enough to assert myself, stand up for myself, and make plain that her behavior is not acceptable to me. I'm tired of just fuming silently every time she does something like this. What should I do?

(...sorry this was so long...)