Answer
Congrats on the progress you’ve made. Overcoming TMS is no small feat!
There could be two things going on:
First, you say that you want to like your job again. Do you like it or not? Completely outside of the experience of your pain, do you like your job? If the answer is no, then that might be a large reason as to why your pain is there. If you don’t like your job, then there is little we can do to force you to like your job. If you love your job, but the pain is still there, then…
The other thing that could be going on is that your pain at work is a conditioned response. By that, I mean that for whatever reason you have come to associate pain with being at work, and because of that expectation the pain is closely related to being at work. If this is the case, then you truly need to teach yourself not to care about this pain. I can tell that you are (as all of us TMSers are) hypervigilant about your body because you are concerned about general stiffness (which is just a normal reaction to sitting and concentrating, by the way). This says to me that you are probably also hypervigilant about the pain. Learn to not care about the pain (keep going to work and don’t let the pain get in your way), and you will break the conditioned response. There is also a lot of information about conditioned responses in other places on the wiki, so I encourage you to look that up.
Keep up the good work! You'll get there.
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