From time to time we all experience Anger.  This is, of course, a normal and natural response to potential threat, the 'fight' part of the fight/flight response.  There is nothing wrong with the anger response: it can be very helpful, and even life-saving in physically threatening situations, because when we are angry our muscles become stronger, and our reflexes become faster.

For our primitive ancestors, anger was a very appropriate automatic response, because the situations they were responding to required immediate, obvious and vigorous action.  In today's more complicated world, anger is often far less useful to us, because in many of the situations we face, we need, not violent and obvious action, but careful thought - and anger actually reduces the blood supply to the frontal parts of the brain, responsible for higher levels of reasoning and thinking! 

So in the modern world, it is not helpful to us for anger just to be an automatic response to many situations.  To put it simply, we need to be in control of our anger.  It becomes a real and potentially dangerous problem if our anger is controlling us.  When working with anger problems of any kind, the work is focussed on enabling the client to increasingly be in control of their own emotions/responses. 

Sometimes, anger may be a fairly obvious response to a situation.  For example, if a person is deliberately bullying or insulting us.  In these situations, anger may be appropriate, but may not be advisable!  It may be that there is a wiser way to respond to the situation that will lead to a more useful outcome - but the anger we feel actually prevents us from thinking of it.   Anger Management will be an important part of the solution to this kind of anger.  Clients generally find this well established way of working easy to learn, and very effective: anger responses can often be reduced to easily manageable levels within weeks. 

In other cases, the client may be quite unable to understand why he or she experiences anger which may be experienced as overwhelming, when in a particular kind of situation.  The intensity of his or her anger seems illogical, even to the person experiencing it.  This is usually the result of unconscious thought processes, which may include the recalling of past injustice or traumatic experience suffered years or decades before, which may have been completely forgotten consciously, but was an intensely emotional experience at the time. 

The structure of this is very similar to that of a phobia, except that the irrational emotion elicited is not fear but anger, and similar ways of treating this can be very successful, using an NLP treatment called detraumatisation.  The treatment of this kind of anger problem may often be complicated by the fact that, in their efforts to make sense of their own responses, a person may have tried to develop a rational explanation for themselves.  Getting beyond this rationalisation may require some work first, before the problem can be treated directly. 

There are other processes and problems that can also result in anger apparently beyond the control of the client, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and detailed treatment of these will vary. 

Finally, it is worth mentioning that there is a certain kind of epilepsy in which seizures manifest as extreme violent behaviour, of which the sufferer has no recollection afterwards.  This is comparatively rare, but if a person cannot consciously remember their own violent behaviour, and they have to be told by others afterwards what they did, I suggest that they discuss the matter with their doctor, with a view to considering referral for neurological tests to eliminate physical causes before psychotherapy is begun.