Counseling is an interactive process conjoin-ing the counselee, who needs assistance and the counselor, who is trained and educated to give assistance.

Role of counselor in dealing with indivi-duals : Counseling deals with wellness, personal growth, career and pathological concerns. In other words, counselors work in area that involve relationships.

Counseling meets the requirement of a wide spectrum of people. Clients have developmental or situational concerns that require help in regard to adjustment or remediation. 

Counseling is intended to help the individuals to realize their potentials and to make optimum contributions to the growth of society. 

Counseling aims at providing assistance to teachers in their efforts to understand their students. 

Counseling aims at developing in student’s qualities such as perseverance, dedication, sincerity, devotion, positive outlook, respect for views of others. 

Currently counseling is also successful to rehabilitate criminals and prevent criminal tendencies and delinquency if detected early. Vocational counseling is provided to criminals to rehabilitate them. 

The common areas of counseling are as follows: 

Child counseling : Counseling dealing with different problems of a child, such as learning difficulties, temper tantrums, conduct problems, lack of concentration, inadequacy in cognitive, perceptual or social development, emotional disturbances and child abuse. 

Parental or family counseling : The main aim is to resolve the problematic issues pertinent in the family of the client. Parental counseling is an extended part of child counseling. It helps to improve parent-child relationship. 

Academic and school counseling : This deals with school children regarding their academic difficulties, relational problems with teachers, classmates, career issues and personal problems.

Workplace counseling : It aims to assist both the employer and the employee by intervening with an active problem-solving approach. It helps in increasing productivity of an organization. 

Couple counseling : This helps couples of any type to realize and resolve their conflicts and improves their relationship. It enables the couples either to make thoughtful decisions about rebuilding the relationship or getting separated. 

Group counseling : People suffering from the same or similar problems get together and share their problems and coping mechanism that they use. They sense a feeling of having a support system. Popular group therapies are seen in the form of alcoholic anonymous, or support group for cancer patients. 

Geriatric counseling : This helps to manage problems arising in and from old-age. 

Counseling of delinquents : Counseling the delinquents involve addressing the emotional, behavioural and personality issues of the delinquents. 

Career counseling : This helps the individual in their decision for the right choice of career or vocational course. 

Sports counseling : This area is mainly concerned with the physical health, mental functioning and performance of a sports person. 

Counseling for mental health issues : Counseling is also used to treat and alleviate mental disorders, adjustment problems and emotional disturbances. Phobia is an anxiety disorder. It means extreme and irrational fear of some specific object or situation that leads to avoidance to these objects or situation by the person. According to DSM-IV- TR There are three kinds of phobia- specific, social and agora-phobia. 

Criteria for specific phobia- (according to DSM-IV-TR): 

• Marked and persistent fear that is excessive and unreasonable caused by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation. 

• Exposure to phobic stimulus provokes an immediate anxiety response or panic attack. 

• Person recognizes that the fear is excessive or unreasonable. 

• Phobic stimuli is avoided or endured with intense anxiety. 

• Symptoms interfere significantly with normal functioning. 

• Duration of at least six months. 

Criteria for social phobia : (according to DSM-IV-TR) 

• Marked or persistent fear of one or more social situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or possible scrutiny of others. 

• Exposure feared social situation provokes anxiety or panic. 

• Person recognizes the fear to be excessive or unreasonable. 

• Feared social or performance situation is avoided or endured with great distress or anxiety. 

• Symptoms interfere significantly with normal functioning. Agoraphobia- the Greek word ‘Agora’ means public places of assembly. 

Criteria for agoraphobia: 

• Anxiety about being in places from which escape might be difficult or in which help may not be available. 

• Situations are avoided or endured with marked distress. 

Causes: 

Biological factors : 

Genetic factors : Genetic and temperamental variables affect the speed and strength of conditioning the fear. Several studies have suggested, a moderate genetic contribution in the development of phobias. Behaviourally inhibited children who are shy, timid and easily distressed are likely to develop phobias from different objects or situations. 

Psychosocial factors: 

1. Psychodynamic perspective : According to this viewpoint phobia is represented as a defense against anxiety that stems from repressed impulses from the Id. It is too dangerous to know the repressed Id impulses the anxiety is displaced on to some external object/ situation that has some symbolic relationship to real objects of anxiety. 

2. Phobias as learned behaviour : The principle of classical conditioning appear to account for the acquisition of irrational fears and phobias. The fear response can readily be conditioned to previously neutral stimuli when these stimuli are paired with traumatic or painful events. Once acquired phobic fears would generalize to other similar situations or objects. 

3. Vicarious conditioning of phobic fears : 

People learn irrational phobic fears simply watching a phobic person. This can be distressing to the observer and can result in fear being transmitted from one person to another through vicarious or observational learning. For example- A boy who has witnessed his grandfather vomit while dying developed a strong and persistent vomiting fear. 

4. Evolutionary preparedness : Humans seem to be evolutionarily prepared to rapidly associate certain objects such as snakes, spiders, water and enclosed spaces with frightening or unpleasant events. This preparedness occurs because certain objects or situations posed real threat to our early ancestors. Thus the prepared fears are not inborn rather they are easily acquired and resistant to extinction. On the other hand social phobia is a result of dominance hierarchies, a common form of social arrangement among animals. Domi¬nance hierarchies are established through aggressive encounters between members of a social group and a defeated individual typically displaces fear and submissive behaviour but rarely attempts to escape the situation completely. Social phobias are evolutionary basis to acquire fears of social stimuli that signal dominance and aggression from other humans. 

5. Cognitive factors : Beck suggested that people with social phobia tend to expect that other people will reject or negatively evaluate them. This leads to a sense of threat from people around them.