Osher Günsberg’s world of pain

When Osher Günsberg’s chronic pain started to affect his relationship he decided to find a way out of it. What he ended up discovering changed his life.

Osher Gunsberg

I went through a period of … increasing, overwhelming and ultimately excruciating pain. I was barely able to breathe sometimes. It was very, very difficult. My wife would ask me to pass her something like a water bottle for my kid’s daycare and she would see the pain written on my face. And I’d have a tension in my voice that reads as if the tension is about her or whatever’s happening in my home but what she doesn’t know is that I’m tallying this agony in my body. It really starts to affect your relationship, it was terrible. I thought to myself at the time, I’m going to get divorced if this keeps going because I’m becoming impossible to live with.

I got really lucky … when I met an incredible doctor. He gave me a horizon to swim towards. He started to paint out what the pathway out of pain might look like. I then had some steps and all I needed to do was trust that I could make it to the next step. It was on this journey as I learnt more about pain, I thought that more people have to know about this. It’s important that we talk about it and it’s important that we understand how our brains work.

Something I get asked all the time is … do you have a rose for me? I wonder if it’s a bit of a Mandela effect because we made 22 separate seasons over the Bachelor franchise and I think only twice I picked up a rose. Apart from that I never touched them. I only ever counted them, and I never ever gave one to somebody else.

When I became a step dad … It was like something came over me and I started telling dad jokes. When I tell a joke you can hear the friction of their eyes rolling inside her sockets. You become like a monster in a horror film that feeds off people’s pain. Oh, it’s delicious.

If I had to have dinner with someone from the past ... I’d want to have dinner with my mum after she left her first husband before she met my dad, which was a period of about five years. She was in London and ended up in Adelaide with my grandparents and her brothers and sisters. Then she met a guy from the RAF who was out here doing some atomic testing. She married him and then went back to London, but very quickly she realised it wasn’t working. I think she had a great time after that, London in the sixties as a 24-year-old, I really want to hear about it.

Hosting The Bachelor.

The time I was most starstruck was …when I met Prince. All I could say was thank you. He’s the greatest of all time.

In another life I would be someone like … Flume. I was very much into hip hop and sampling. But I was also getting really into jazz. When I was young I walked into the music shop and told (the man there) the kind of music I wanted to make and he pointed to the AKAI MPC and said that is the machine that makes all of your favourite records. In my head, I thought no “You’re a piano player, you should get something that suits that”. So I asked for a machine that was compatible with the keyboard. That was the moment that my musical career went in a different direction. I was trying to use this machine that I bought to make stuff that it wasn’t designed to do. If I’d got the other one, I would have been able to make the kind of music I wanted to. And so it died off. And that’s when radio and television became what I was focusing on.

I believe fundamentally … that the only reason humans are alive is because we have an inbuilt sense of goodness and kindness and help inside of us. We are wired to connect, to help, to co-operate. We’re going to be OK, no matter what, we’ll figure it out.

Osher Gunsberg: A World of Pain is available to stream on SBS On Demand.