Love Your Villain is the raw, unfiltered podcast that helps you stop running from your shadow—and start loving it.
The jealousy, the rage, the insecurity, the shame…
They’re not your flaws.
They’re your story.
This is where emotional honesty meets radical self-ownership.
No sugarcoating. No bypassing.
Welcome to the podcast that helps you turn your “worst” into your power.
Why are so many parents left to carry it all alone?
In this episode, Ila responds to the comments on her episode about rage and parenting, and to the Lindsay Clancy case, to ask a hard question: what happens to parents when there is no village?
She talks about the parts of motherhood we rarely name out loud: the grief of miscarriage, the hormonal aftermath of birth, the guilt of splitting your attention between children, and the pressure to cope without asking for help. She also shares her own experience of running out of time to have children, and the grief that came with it.
From there, the conversation widens. Why does society have so little tolerance for a crying baby? Why is apologising seen as weakness? Ila traces these back to a lack of emotional literacy passed down through generations, and shares why she wrote Love Your Villain: to help break the cycle of emotional abuse before it reaches the next generation of children.
This is not an episode about excusing harm. It is about what becomes possible when we meet suffering with compassion instead of shame, and when adults learn to sit with, identify and label their own difficult emotions.
In this episode:
Why miscarriage and postpartum struggles deserve far more acknowledgement
How isolation and a lack of support wear parents down
Why a crying baby triggers us, and where that comes from
What a personal experience with a partner's suicide attempt taught Ila about pain and escape
Why emotional literacy in adults is the real protection for children
Content note: this episode discusses suicide (including a description of an attempt), infant and child loss, miscarriage, infertility and postpartum mental illness. Please take care while listening. If you are struggling, reach out to your local crisis line or someone you trust.
23 Sept 2026
S2. Ep6 How to Cope With What's Behind Closed Doors
This episode of Love Your Villain gets honest about what happens behind closed doors. Host Ila Casselman sits down with a father of two daughters, married 20 years, to explore sexual shame, masturbation, porn, and the religious conditioning that follows us into marriage.
We unpack avoidant attachment, the freeze response, and how purity culture shapes intimacy. Plus: kink as a healing modality, consent and power dynamics, parenting and sex education, and why dads should talk to their daughters about periods.
A raw, funny, deeply honest shadow-work conversation about pleasure, shame, and breaking generational patterns for parents and couples. Explicit content.
8 Sept 2026
S2 Ep.5 Mother & Their Sons
Mothers, this one might sting.
In this episode I'm talking about the way we raise our sons — and how "doing everything for him" isn't love, it's a disservice. Daughters get taught to cook, clean, and run a household. Sons get asked to take the bin out. Then they leave home unable to feed themselves and move in with a girlfriend who inherits the job their mother never gave them.
But this goes deeper than chores. I'm unpacking what happens when a woman craving deep emotional connection doesn't get it from her partner — and gets it, effortlessly and chemically, from her newborn son instead. The father retreats. The bond becomes the primary relationship. And that little boy grows into a man who has the bandwidth for exactly one deep emotional connection: his mother.
We cover:
Why teaching your son domestic responsibility builds resilience, not resentment
The Harvard research on children who share the household load
How the oxytocin bond after birth can quietly push a partner into second place
The emotionally immature mother: guilt, shame, crossed boundaries, and the void she asks her son to fill
Why avoidance, gaslighting, deflecting, and running from conflict get built in childhood
Accountability as the thing that ends the cycle — for him, and for you
Your job as a parent is to prepare your child emotionally, physically, and intellectually for the wild. Not to keep them needing you.
26 Aug 2026
S2. Ep4. Parenting & Rage
In this honest conversation, Ila sits down with her friend Marla to explore the rage nobody warned her about in the stages of parenting. Marla shares the realities of sleep deprivation, emotional overload, single motherhood, suppressed anger, and raising children without a village. Together, they examine how childhood conditioning teaches women to silence their emotions, how unexpressed rage turns inward, and why repair matters more than perfection. This episode is a compassionate reminder that parental anger often hides exhaustion, isolation, grief, unmet needs, and that healing begins with honesty, support, emotional responsibility, and learning to love the villain within.
11 Aug 2026
S2. Ep.3. Whoops I'm Pregnant!
"Whoops, we're pregnant" is never just an accident. It's a decision two people made and rarely take responsibility for.
In this raw, unfiltered episode, Ila shares her own teenage pregnancy and the choice to terminate at 15, and doesn't hold back on what "accidental" pregnancy really does to a child, a relationship, and a woman's body autonomy.
This one's confronting by design. A hard look at sexual responsibility, the myth of the baby that "saves" a relationship, and why loving a child sometimes means not having one yet.
CW: Teen pregnancy, abortion, sexual coercion, addiction, loss. Listener discretion advised.
28 Jul 2026
S2. Ep2. Identify Theft With Delilah
Who were you before the world told you who you needed to be?
Identity isn't something we lose overnight. It happens quietly.
Through the roles we take on. The expectations we carry. And the belief that being needed is the same as being worthy.
In Episode 2 of Love Your Villain, I sit down with Delilah Patton to explore what happens when our identity becomes wrapped up in who we're expected to be. And how we begin finding our way back to ourselves.
14 Jul 2026
S2. Ep 1. Parenting is no F'ing Joke
Season 2 of Love Your Villain kicks off with the topic nobody wants to say out loud: parenting will wreck you, and that's normal.
Ila isn't a parent. She's not a child psychologist. What she is: an osteopath who spent years helping women through fertility struggles, pregnancy, and postpartum recovery, and someone who made the hard call not to have kids of her own. In this raw, unfiltered episode, she pulls back the curtain on what actually happens behind closed doors: the grief of infertility, the physical toll pregnancy takes that no one warns you about, the shame spiral of a baby who won't latch, and the crying that breaks even the most put-together parent.
This isn't a gentle parenting podcast. It's a call to stop blaming your kid for your own dysregulation, stop pretending pregnancy is all glow and gratitude, and start taking responsibility, as a parent, as a partner, as a society, for the humans we're raising.
If you're a new parent, an exhausted parent, or someone who's ever felt isolated in the hardest job you'll ever do: this one's for you.
18 Nov 2025
Episode 10: Exploring Your Inner Villain with Book Editor Tina Overbury
We’re ending the season with a powerful reflection on writing, healing, and shadow work. 🖤
Tina Overbury (@tinaolife), the editor of my book 'Love Your Villain', joins me to talk about the emotional layers behind the writing process, exploring hidden anger, judgment, boundary guilt, and the weight of people-pleasing.
She shares how working on the Love Your Villain Book helped her meet her own inner villain. Together, we unpack what it means to stop suppressing those parts and start integrating them with awareness, curiosity, and grace.
4 Nov 2025
Episode 9: Sexy Villain
This week on #LoveYourVillain, we’re diving into the parts of ourselves we’ve been told to hide, the ones driven by pleasure, curiosity, and desire.💗
In this unfiltered episode, Simone joins me for an intimate conversation about sensuality, emotional honesty, and how embracing your “sexy villain” can actually bring you closer to healing, integrity, and trust.
We talk jealousy, communication, kink, and the difference between being good and being whole.
What if the part of you that craves pleasure, intimacy, and freedom wasn’t a problem to fix but a truth to explore?
21 Oct 2025
Episode 8 - How Emotional Literacy Can Change Your Life
Episode 8 - How Emotional Literacy Can Change Your Life is out now.
We’re taught to chase good vibes and fear bad ones but what if all emotions had value?
In this solo episode, I unpack how emotional literacy can transform your life.
We talk about triggers, jealousy, emotional maturity, and how true emotional maturity comes from recognizing, understanding, and validating your emotions.
7 Oct 2025
Ep 7. Addiction
Ep 7: Addiction with guest Arthur Lee
Addiction is about pain, disconnection, and the need to numb yourself when emotions feel too heavy to carry.
Arthur joins me to talk honestly about his journey through alcoholism, drug use, and emotional healing.
We explore what addiction can look like, what recovery really takes, and how emotional literacy can save a life. And what it really takes to come back to yourself.
23 Sept 2025
Ep.6 It's Emotional
No one ever handed us a map for how to feel. Many of us grew up around emotional avoidance, passed-down trauma, and parents who didn’t know how to process their own pain, so they made us responsible for it.
In this solo episode, I unpack what emotional literacy really means, why naming emotions is powerful, and how our relationship to feelings shapes everything from addiction to intimacy.
We’re breaking down the myth that emotions make you weak.
They don’t. They make you honest.
9 Sept 2025
Where Healing Really Begins
🎙️Coming up on #LoveYourVillain is Ep 5: Where Healing Really Begins with Moriah Gonidis
We’re talking about what healing actually looks like at the start: messy, raw, and real.
Moriah shares how she began facing her inner villain, learning to pause before reacting, and rebuilding a life based on truth instead of survival.
In this honest and vulnerable episode. Moriah shares her experience facing her inner villain, learning to pause instead of react, and rebuilding life from the inside out. We, talk about the emotional “workout” of healing and why it feels hard at first, but gets easier with time.
26 Aug 2025
Why We Love the Way We Do: Anxious & Avoidant Attachment Trap
Is your Villain Anxious, Avoidant or both? In this episode of Love Your Villain, we're diving into the attachment trap. I get personal about my own anxious-avoidant attachment:
How they can play out in a relationships.
How they are formed.
What it takes to shift toward security.
I break down how our earliest bonds shape the way we relate, and why self-abandonment, emotional explosions, and shame spirals often start as survival strategies.
If you’ve ever felt too much or not enough in love, this one’s for you.
12 Aug 2025
#3 Emotional Capacity & Availability
Emotional Availability with @bebhinnpidgeon
In this episode, Bebhinn Pidgeon, RTC and founder of @evolvecreativetherapy, shares how expressive arts, nervous system work, and self-reflection can help us soften our armor and show up with more presence and honesty.
It’s not about being emotionally perfect.
It’s about being emotionally real.
🎭 Love your villain because the walls you built were once your only form of safety.
29 Jul 2025
#2 A Villain Begins
A Villain Begins talks about the origin and development of the Villain AKA the shadow side of our personality. The unconscious version of us we were taught as babies to suppress for fear of not being loved or liked by the people that mattered the most to us. And it all starts with crying.
I'm an osteopath, a lifelong personal growth explorer, with 21 years of clinical experience and a master's degree in osteopathic medicine. I've spent my career holding space for pain in all its forms, physical, emotional, generational, and ancestral. My practice evolved from treating bodies to understanding the stories those bodies carry. And what I've come to know as this true healing doesn't come from fixing, performing, or pleasing our way into acceptance. It begins when we stop pretending to be okay, when we meet the messy, misunderstood parts of ourselves with curiosity instead of shame. We stop abandoning our emotional truth and finally choose to love the villain we became to survive.
15 Jul 2025
#1 How IMPOSTER SYNDROME can Creep in to your Mindset & Sabotage your Goals
🎙How Imposter Syndrome Creeps Into Your Mindset and Sabotages Your Dreams. Episode One.
Ever felt like a fraud in your own life? Like you're just one mistake away from being "found out"? That quiet voice whispering "Who do you think you are?" — that’s imposter syndrome. It's your saboteur.
In this episode of Love Your Villain, we expose how imposter syndrome doesn't just whisper — it manipulates. It disguises itself as humility, perfectionism, procrastination, and even people-pleasing. It convinces you to shrink, second-guess your voice, and play small in rooms you were born to take up space in.
We unpack:
The childhood roots of imposter syndrome
How shame and comparison feed it
The sneaky ways it shows up in success
And how to meet it with truth instead of fear
If you’ve ever delayed a dream, talked yourself out of applying, or felt like you had to "earn" your worth — this one’s for you.
🖤 Because the villain isn’t always loud — sometimes, it’s the quietest thought in your head.
More on Katy:
Wholistic Nutritionist & mum of four boys. You can find out more information on Katy via Instagram: @Hauorawellness and her website: http://www.hauorawellness.com (http://www.hauorawellness.com/)
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