I haven't read all the posts yet, but just reading your story I remember that he is 4, right? The give your kids a warning and expect them to remember to come in 15 minutes is a skill that I don't think my teenagers possess. No sense of time, they will agree to anything if it gives them more play time, etc. And no matter how many warnings they get, they would still have melted down. Perhaps you need to change your focus-- say ok if I let him do this, I will get a meltdown when it is time to stop, guaranteed, so is there anything I can do to make the meltdown shorter, less painful--transition maybe to 15 minutes of his favorite movie to let him calm down or something like that? I also read your post about dysgraphia. Malika, please don't take this the wrong way, but maybe you are looking under rocks for problems that don't exist, or don't exist yet. Not saying that your child is not a difficult child, only that he is a pretty normal difficult child (whatever that means) and you are perhaps worrying a bit too much at this young age.
I think you are being totally unrealistic about what your child is capable of. I also think that you are seeing not the teenage lout but the temper tantrum 2 year old coming out--unfortunately now with greater verbal capacities. When I read what you write I just think about a kid that gets so wound up he has no way to wind down appropriately--it requires a major meltdown.
One thing you might want to examine is the unstructured play time. Can you have kids in your yard where you can keep an eye on them? Don't know what is possible, but I think somehow if you could reduce that it would help a great deal because that is where your problems come.
As to how you learn to deal with it and not lose your temper....well, most of us have bad parenting moments. Part of it is getting rid of the triggers that lead to these situations, because none of us are saints.
Just went back and read the posts. I sometimes think about what my biological children would have been like. No doubt there would have been issues but realistically probably not at the level of what i am dealing with now. Sometimes I think I can say that I hated my children and the stress and unhappiness they have contributed to our family life. Maybe all parents have those momemts, it is only here where people are honest enough to share their feelings. And it is frightening now that they are in their teenage years and really capable of messing up big time...Somehow we have survived all those moments that I really wondered how we were going to go on--they have made progress and so have I.
You have a great deal of insight into your self, the buttons your child pushes, etc. That's good, but I suppose you could be over analyzing everything too.
Your child right now is 4. He sounds a pretty typical average difficult child 4, not a sociopathic difficult child 4 or a kid with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) or really major issues. Actually he sounds so much like my Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) youngest kid.
I'm not sure where I am going with all this, only that it seems like you are torturing yourself about what actually seems like pretty good parenting. A little bit of psychobabble gained from years of therapy--sometimes we try to make up for the deficiencies in the way we were parented by doing better for our children--is it possible that you are still working out things in how you were parented and not taking a very realistic view of the good parenting job you are currently doing? Or that you are very hard on yourself by nature and transferring that to your child? Don't know, just my sense that you beat yourself up too much for things most of us would call a good parenting day. LOL.
Sorry, I'm probably not helping much.