Love Your Villain Podcast

Ila.casselman
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Daily

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.

  1. Oct 7

    S2 Ep.7 The Isolation of Parenting

    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 acknowledgementHow isolation and a lack of support wear parents downWhy a crying baby triggers us, and where that comes fromWhat a personal experience with a partner's suicide attempt taught Ila about pain and escapeWhy emotional literacy in adults is the real protection for childrenContent 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.

  2. Sep 23

    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.

  3. Sep 8

    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 resentmentThe Harvard research on children who share the household loadHow the oxytocin bond after birth can quietly push a partner into second placeThe emotionally immature mother: guilt, shame, crossed boundaries, and the void she asks her son to fillWhy avoidance, gaslighting, deflecting, and running from conflict get built in childhoodAccountability as the thing that ends the cycle — for him, and for youYour job as a parent is to prepare your child emotionally, physically, and intellectually for the wild. Not to keep them needing you.

  4. Aug 26

    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.

  5. Aug 11

    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.

  6. Jul 28

    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.

  7. Jul 14

    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.

  8. 11/18/2025

    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.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Ila.casselman
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    17
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Ila.casselman
  • Show Website
    Love Your Villain Podcast