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[Inithis]

I've had a lot of trouble in recent years controlling my emotional reactions. Generally, this appears when I get in an arguement or other disagreement. Usually as such an event goes on, I'll get angrier and angrier until I start physically fighting the person. I've gotten this reaction mostly under control, but it doesn't end there. Lately after a prolonged arguement I'll have a sudden rush of guilt and self-anger. No matter how upset I was with the other person, suddenly I translate that anger
to myself. There's no warning; one second I'll be furious with a person, the next I'll be bemoaning my own pathetic nature and I'll start pleading for forgiveness. Recently it's gotten even worse, to the point of actually hitting myself with something, a thing I haven't done since I was
very little.

What I want to know is; is there any way I can control myself during these points where my worldview twists horribly? Is there a way I can avert these unreasonable fits altogether?

[weenog]

Being incarcerated several times did it for me.  I still get mad enough to chew horseshoes and spit nails sometimes.  Now I ask myself, "is tolerating (whatever irritant or injustice is upsetting me) worse than spending several months in a cage?"  So far the answer is always "no," so I rein that shit in.  I can't control how I feel, but I can control how I react to how I feel.

[LordBucket]

What I want to know is; is there any way I can control myself during these points where my
worldview twists horribly? Is there a way I can avert these unreasonable fits altogether?

It is difficult to control feelings, if by "control" you mean "make them not happen." But you can learn to keep them from controlling you. It's not the anger that's a problem so much as your reaction to it. Emotions must be accepted. Trying to bottle them up and pretend they don't exist rarely ends well.

I would suggest practicing with something less volatile. For example, try watching youtube videos of sleeping kittens and hedgehogs cuddling each other. For example, watch this. Or this. While you do, observe your emotional reaction. Do you feel something? Do you feel happy? Do you feel like you're "not supposed to" smile and be happy because "you're a man" and real men don't giggle over sleeping puppies? Or do you feel nothing?

Whatever your emotional response, allow it. Know that it's ok. There's no need to surpress it, and there's no need to force anything. However you feel or don't feel, that's ok.

Now, try something else. For example, here's a video of Arab protesters burning a US flag. Here's a news report about a guy who raped an unconscious girl on live webcam. Here's a video about a guy who abused a cat. Watch that. How does it make you feel? Do you feel horror at the image of Dusty huddled helplessly against the wall, visibly mutilated? Do you feel rage and fury at the boy holding him against the wall? Do you feel righteous, vengeful joy at seeing that Dusty was rescued and the boy arrested?

However you feel...let the feelings out. Don't hold them back. Allow yourself to feel whatever your heart needs to feel. Cry if you have to. It's ok. Nobody has to know.

Feel.

Learn how to accept your emotions. They are part of you. Learn how to live with them. Learn how to feel them, without the need to ignore or deny them and without them controlling you. And once you have felt them, once you have given them their just due, let them go without dwelling on them. Just like the air you breath that passes through your lungs and then is released...let your emotions in, experience them fully, and let them go.

[scrdest]

What I want to know is; is there any way I can control myself during these points where my
worldview twists horribly? Is there a way I can avert these unreasonable fits altogether?

However you feel...let the feelings out. Don't hold them back. Allow yourself to feel whatever your heart needs to feel. Cry if you have to. It's ok. Nobody has to know.

NO! GOD! NO! DO. NOT. DO. THAT. EVER. This is why you don't take internet advice too seriously. This is literally the worst thing a person with anger issues can do. If you will let out your anger, the episodes will be more frequent and stronger. That's how mind works.

Acknowledge your anger and, instead of escalating, leave. Just like that. Get the person you're angry at out of your sight (and range ). It's not going to be easy when you're emotional, but once you start doing it, you'll get into the habit and it'll be easier. Keep in mind that leaving wordlessly is at least as, if not more powerful message than any insult you might fling.

Next: as weird as it sounds, anger is not about attacking. Anger is about defense. You get angry because something you value, be it possessions, people or ideas, are threatened. So anger, in itself, is not wrong. But, you have to calibrate your response to the threat. You don't use a rocket launcher to kill a mosquito on the wall.

Furthermore, when you react with anger, the other person feels threatened by you and, just like you before, reacts to the threat. And now you're in a vicious cycle of two people taking turns at pissing the other person off even more, until someone either hits the other person or removes himself from the conflict physically.

[Lectorog]

LordBucket isn't suggesting letting your feelings have their way. What is being suggested is becoming more acquainted with your feelings so that you can just feel them, rather than having them be some strange thing that suddenly comes up. Your quoted portion starts shortly after

Learn how to feel them, without the need to ignore or deny them and without them controlling you.

Another suggestion:
Instead of releasing all that energy upon others or yourself, put it into something like a handstand. Prop yourself up on your hands, head down. Maintain it for as long as possible. If you have to be angry at something, be angry at the floor; after all, the situation would likely not have arisen if not for the floor's presence. You may even black out, which is great for removing temporary emotion.

[Shakerag]

However you feel...let the feelings out. Don't hold them back. Allow yourself to feel whatever your heart needs to feel. Cry if you have to. It's ok. Nobody has to know.

Because it is my nature to provide a counter-point, may I suggest apathy and becoming emotionally numb?  If you don't care about anything anymore, it becomes very difficult to have a sudden emotional outburst.  Sure, there are no emotional highs, but you don't have to deal with those pesky emotional lows either.

[Lectorog]

Trust me, emotional numbness isn't worth it.

[nenjin]

I understand the anger --> guilt thing pretty well. It's not just in face to face dealings, it happens to me on the internet all the time. It's your personal demon, so you'd better learn to respect its presence in your every day life. When you're forming a retort, remember It is there, right at your shoulder, waiting for you to go too far. On your other shoulder is going to be your ego convincing you that your anger is justified, that you have every right in the world to be that angry, that vehement. You have to try and be semi-rational in the throes of an emotion that ain't having none of it.

Just hang on to the memory of how awful you feel when you've let loose on someone that, even if they deserved something, didn't deserve that. Let that memory temper your responses, remind you that you're wrong plenty of times and you should go forward with caution, with a measured response. Give up on being right, people are rarely going to agree with you about something they feel strongly about. And that includes facts.

I'd like to say checking yourself is something that becomes routine, but it doesn't. It's something you have to do every time you get heated.

Failing that, I've learned to just walk away from arguments when I'm getting truly pissed. I've noticed it's a trait that runs in the males in my family. We'll discourse all day long but when we've hit boiling point, we've all learned to walk away before we say or do something we regret. If your only rational response during an argument is to say something meaner and nastier or louder than the last thing you've said, or start hitting someone, you've probably hit that point. And trust me, you're doing everyone, yourself most of all, a favor by ending the conversation/debate/argument there.

Also, don't plead for forgiveness just to make yourself feel better. You apologize, and that's that. People either forgive you or don't, and I feel like taking ownership of your anger and your actions is diminished when you beg other's forgiveness. Maybe I've just been in trouble so many times in life, with parents, teachers, the law....I've just learned that you earn more respect by apologizing and owning it than by begging for their forgiveness. Being a repeat offender doesn't help either.

[Shakerag]

Trust me, emotional numbness isn't worth it.

And I'll say that what doesn't work for one may work for another. 

[Heron TSG]

I'm pretty familiar with anger.

I'm told that quite a few of my more distant relatives have died from suicide, and that depression runs in both sides of my family. My mom has it, her parents had it, my dad has it, his parents had it, my sister has it, and apparently a lot of my aunts and uncles get it. Me? Well, I don't get sad or lethargic. I follow my dad's other tendency to always need to be doing something. So instead of getting depressed, I occasionally get incredibly angry for days at a time. I might feel that I'm doing practically nothing with my social life, I'm not learning as much as I should at school, or whatever. Sometimes I get Seasonal Affective Disorder from the lack of sun over on the west coast of Washington, but instead of getting 'sad', I just get mad. I don't know why, but I get angry instead of sad at pretty much every standard time to become sad. I generally channel this towards anger at myself and that drives me to do something about it. Last winter I had a few weeks where we didn't really cover anything new in my C class, and were just catching people up who joined at the quarter. Considering how much tuition costs, I was pretty steamed. So I decided to go make a massive pixel art mural of dragons. It took me 17 straight hours at my computer, but I knew I had to do something. More viscerally, when I was in cross country in high school, I would become very angry at myself if I let myself be passed by an opponent. Not because I hated being passed (I did), but because my team depended on me placing ahead of those people in terms of points. I could forgive myself for not being able to beat those people, but I couldn't forgive myself that. It let me push on through all reason and pain to catch back up and sprint for a bit of a lead.

It seems to me that while you do translate your anger to yourself, which is a lot better than lashing out at other people, you aren't handling it very well. You're not pathetic, and you don't need to hit yourself. Just channel that anger into fixing what caused it. Angry about losing a debate about some fact or another? Spend a while researching it while you cool down. Angry about arguing with a friend? Let your anger give you the willpower to calmly apologize if necessary, or at least the courage to admit you were wrong. Anger can be a tool, it doesn't have to be a bond.

[Felicido]

Similar issues with punching myself, just haven't really gotten mad at others as much as I have at myself, since I'm generally prone to melancholia and I despise it. Thankfully it hasn't happened a lot, only maybe once in my life besides the two episodes I've had since I started taking antidepressants early this year. It didn't scare me too much since I know it's partly because of the meds and I haven't tried/didn't try anything more excessive than bruising and a bleeding nose (high blood pressure or something, not really physical trauma), but of course it worries me. Mainly because I also did it in front of others. While these were people I trust it obviously just made me feel way shittier. They'd give me attention even without me making a scene.

Despite all that, I feel I've gotten more confident in expressing my thoughts and feelings in a constructive way without bottling them up. I'm shy, awkward (stuttering, speaking too quietly and slowly at times, trouble keeping eye contact, I may tremble and hyperventilate in certain situations) and maybe too much of a "bleeding heart" most of the time. While I can live with being quieter than most, I should sometimes allow myself to be more talkative regardless of how annoying and/or brutally honest I might come off as. I don't want to take living too seriously and obsess over every little thing that I feel is wrong, but enjoy even the little daily successes and view things with more humor than normally. I don't need to be embarrassed of everything or feel guilty all the time, if I really screw something up it's not going to end me, I can always try focusing my anger on making things better.

Obviously all that can't be forced, it'll just have to come with time and introspection if at all. Like posting this message for instance, I tend to write walls of texts every time I post but usually just give up altogether because of my super critical inner "editor". I hope this'll be of at least some help or substance despite it being more of a tirade than advice.

[Dwarf Kitty]

Since this behavior is getting worse and more worrisome for you, go see a good psychiatrist if you can afford it.  Mood stabilizers can help greatly.
 
It did with my mom.  She's a bit anxious and worried and mildly bipolar.  She still gets worked up about stuff, but she doesn't go quite as far as she used to, and she calms down a lot faster.
 
If anything, the meds will give all this other advice a better chance to take hold.