ketzel...you stated sooo well what i was thinking.
From the time my daughter could crawl, she threw the most horrible tantrums. There weren't any small ones...they were all lightning quick and huge. They got progressively worse as she got older. When she was 5, we found out why. She suffered from brain damage due to an illness when she was 3 months old. Yep...frustration for her. She knew she should be able to do things, but couldn't figure out why she couldn't. She's 21 now, and still gets very frustrated.
Distraction works well, usually. In our case, the frustration was because things weren't going the way Staci wanted them to. She couldn't express her thoughts clearly enough to make me understand what was wrong, so she lashed out. If I tried to talk her down, she wouldn't listen. So, I would just stand there, listen to her scream (and I mean scream...at the top of her lungs) and count to about 5000...lol.
Recently, I just started mimicing her. It works sometimes, making her laugh. Other times it just makes her angrier. It's always a gamble dealing with tantrums.
Above all, and ketzel said it best, do NOT let yourself get involved in the tantrum. Keep yourself separate. Controlling your own frustration is hard, but necessary. Bad karma bouces and grows, ya know
And, this is just my opinion...but I'm not sure punishment really works well for frustration. I mean, think about it. You get frustrated. You blow your cool. Do you "learn a lesson" when you get punished for that? Or does it make you more frustrated? Again, just my opinion, but I think I would make it clear to the child that the punishment is for the particular BEHAVIOR during the fit. Not the fit itself. If there is punishment, it is for slamming doors, or doing physical harm to someone else. And the only way to make that clear to the child is after the fit is over...when s/he is calm enough to listen. Again, only my opinion, and my case was a little different from most, I know. Staci didn't react physically, so to speak. Her fits were just LOUD...lol.