Dan Pugel

What clients carry away from working with Dan Pugel is something he describes plainly: new insight, growth, healing, and the capacity for real change. Dan is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor based in Nicholasville, Kentucky, with two decades of practice spanning individual therapy, marriage and family work, crisis intervention, trauma recovery, and spiritual counseling. He works with people across every stage of life — children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly — including those navigating addiction, abuse, mood and personality disorders, and the grinding weight of professional burnout.

Dan’s approach is collaborative and unhurried. Counselor and client move at a pace they choose together, inside a confidential space where honest exploration is the point. He takes seriously the reasons people talk themselves out of getting help — the sense that struggles aren’t serious enough, that others couldn’t possibly understand, that change means giving something up — and meets those doubts without judgment. For many people today, anxiety doesn’t clock out at five; it follows them home through their phones, feeding on late-night scrolling and the inbox that never quite closes, and that kind of quiet pressure is exactly what Dan helps people name and address.

Holding a B.S. in Psychology from Toccoa Falls College and an M.A. in Counseling from Asbury Theological Seminary, Dan offers both in-person and online sessions through his practice, Journey Counseling.