The answer to this, for me, kind of depends on how you define losing your temper. If you mean being so angry that you completely lose any sense of holding yourself back and you are willing to do anything to hurt the person you are angry at, then I think I’ve only done that once in my life and it happened thirty years ago. Of course, me being me, the only violence on my part involved me throwing a piece of rotten fruit at the object of my hatred. I think it was a pear.
If you mean merely losing control of your tongue and your anger, but not to the point of violence, that happened two or three years ago. I got really, really angry with my son for not even trying to play something he was supposed to be working on in piano practice. I screamed at him and I couldn’t have come closer to hitting him without actually hitting him.
I was immediately so shocked at my behavior and my feelings that I walked right out the front door and didn’t come back for several hours of walking around. One thought ran around in my mind over and over: no one loves me. No one cares if I disappear. I should just go, and never stop.
What I didn’t know at that time was that I was experiencing symptoms of my first mania. Indeed, I kind of thought I was crazy, but not diagnosably crazy. The incident scared me badly, and I have never let myself come close to that since.