‘Burned alive’: Aussie star’s eight-year hell

Canadian-born Aussie model and author Tara Moss has been battling a debilitating condition for years that’s left her in huge amounts of pain.

After eight years chronicling her battle against a debilitating pain disorder, best-selling author Tara Rae Moss is writing a new chapter.

In an interview with Stellar, released today, the former model and TV personality opens up about living with complex regional pain syndrome, the debilitating condition she’s battled for eight years, which caused acute physical agony and left her bedridden, using a wheelchair and at times using a cane.

“Your body is in fight or flight and you feel like you’re being burned alive. Your body doesn’t know you’re not being burned alive. You’re actually having that experience in a real sense.

Moss circa 1999, as a rising star of both modelling and publishing. Picture: Mark Bradley.

Now 50, Moss has suffered some serious health setbacks in recent years. Picture: Berndt Sellheim

“You’re not healing because your body’s busy trying to give you energy to get out of your life-threatening situation,” the Canadian-born, Aussie-based star tells Stellar.

Since enlisting in a virtual reality (VR) trial three years ago, she has been able to turn a corner and better manage her response to the pain.

Moss also opens up about the subtle name change she’s undergone in recent times, revealing that in her day to day life, she now goes by “Tara Rae” – and sometimes even just “Rae.”

Tara Moss has lived with a debilitating condition for years.

“I don’t feel like ‘Tara’ in the same way, and I’m embracing it rather than denying it. She’s great!” she says of the name she became famous with back in the 90s as a model and burgeoning author. .

“It’s not like I went, ‘Gee, I don’t want to be her anymore’, but I don’t feel like that previous person. So I decided to reclaim all the parts of myself that I was born with. It’s part of a reclaiming of my whole self,” she sad of reclaiming “Rae,” a name given to her by her mother who died in 1990 when Moss was just 16.

Moss and former husband Berndt Sellheim.

Her interview is in the latest issue of Stellar magazine.

Elsewhere in her chat with Stellar, 50-year-old Moss, who has been married three times, reflects on her most recent marriage, a 15-year union with Australian poet and philosopher Berndt Sellheim that ended this year.

The former couple have a 13-year-old daughter together named Sapphira, and Moss said she rejects the notion that their marriage had “failed” just because it ended.

“I reject the idea that a 15-year relationship, with all of that wonder and beauty, is a failure. Sometimes it’s healthiest for certain bonds to be released. I don’t think relationships, certainly not of this type, end. They’re just changing form. It’s not the thing you plan, but it is sometimes the thing you have to adapt to.”

Read the full interview with Tara Rae Moss in Stellar inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA)

Originally published as ‘Burned alive’: Aussie star’s eight-year hell