Young Adult Therapy Los Angeles
The Static You Tune Out
Something can be wrong for a long time before it's audible — even to the person living it. There's no single event to point to. Just a constant low hum of pressure — to be successful, to look a certain way, to keep up with everyone else's highlight reel — until anxiety and low mood stop registering as a problem and start feeling like background noise. By the time it's loud enough to notice, it can be hard to remember what quiet even felt like.
Underneath the Anxiety
Most approaches to anxiety and depression treat them as the problem to solve — symptoms to manage, thoughts to reframe. But for many young adults, what's underneath is a different and harder question: who am I when I'm not performing what everyone around me needs me to be? The version your parents expect. The version that reads as put-together online. That question can touch anything — what you want to do with your life, what you actually believe, who you love, what kind of relationship you want with your family. Managing the anxiety without touching that question just makes someone better at performing a life that still isn't theirs.
Untangling From Home
For a lot of young adults, the hardest relationship to figure out isn't a romantic one — it's the one with the people who raised you. You can love your parents and still feel unknown by them. You can be capable and independent on paper and still find yourself reacting to them like you're fifteen. Part of growing up is realizing how much of what you believe about yourself — what's acceptable to want, to feel, to become — was formed inside that relationship, often without anyone meaning for it to happen that way. Making sense of that isn't about blaming anyone. It's about telling the difference between what's actually yours and what you inherited without choosing.
Wanting to Be Wanted
Underneath a lot of anxiety and depression is something simpler and harder to say out loud: a wish to be truly wanted, not just tolerated or managed. Some people handle that by pulling back — staying guarded, avoiding situations where they might be judged or left out. Others feel everything intensely and don't know where to put it, so it comes out as panic, or shuts down into numbness. Either way, the isolation tends to feed the problem it's trying to protect against. Understanding why connection feels so fraught — and building the capacity to actually let someone in — is often where the real change happens.
What the Work Looks Like
This work is intensive and depth-oriented — sessions are typically twice weekly, not as a rule, but because a question this size takes sustained attention to actually get underneath. It's collaborative and honest. You won't be handed a framework or a five-step plan. You'll be met, and you'll be challenged to look at what's actually going on, not just what's easiest to name. If you're struggling with who you are, what you want, or the gap between what you show people and what you feel — that's exactly where this work starts. You don't need to have it figured out before reaching out.
About Jack Irmas, LCSW
Jack Irmas, LCSW is a psychodynamic psychotherapist based in the Carthay Square neighborhood of Los Angeles. With post-graduate training in psychodynamic psychotherapy, he founded Beacon Psychotherapy to offer a different kind of clinical experience — one oriented toward depth, genuine change, and the kind of work that actually gets at what's underneath the surface. He is also a faculty member at the Wright Institute Los Angeles, where he teaches clinical thinking and technique to the next generation of therapists. You can find out more about his work here.
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Getting Started
If this approach resonates, the next step is a brief phone consultation.