Love Your Villain Podcast

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 att...

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, co...

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 the...

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...

"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 sexu...

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...

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, unfilter...

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...

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...

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.

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 bac...

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 br...

🎙️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...

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 sha...

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 y...

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 de...

🎙 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&#39...