Just so we're clear: the only person who can humiliate you, diminish you, play with your feelings and consistently wreck your chance of success and a good life is you yourself.
Only you, only you, only you.
If I have already ruined our relationship in the first paragraph, then I have nothing to lose — take two more kicking messages, which come from a foul mouth but a caring heart.
Imagine that all the people around you are salespeople marketing ideas to you. Some of the ideas they sell you are ideas about who you are and what you are.
And here's a brilliant idea — you don't have to buy.
If he lashes out at you: "I've had enough of you, you idiot. You'll always be an ugly version of your mother," and other such pearls, remember that he is in the middle of an enthusiastic sales campaign whose purpose is presumably to save his own self-image.
Even in such moments of low ebb and attack, remember — he is not against you. He is for himself. (And if he speaks to you like that, he is probably an idiot and weak.)
You don't have to buy. You don't have to buy.
But I promised another idea. You'll like this one less.
Listen, I'm not a coach and I'm not a spiritual type, so I am the last person who will preach to you to go to the other extreme and fly high about yourself, automatically deflecting all criticism.
I loathe the indiscriminate "love yourself" genre, because it usually leads you to adopt a defiant and childish position — "I'm fine as I am, and woe betide anyone who says otherwise."
The truth? You aren't. You aren't fine as you are. Neither am I. Nobody is.
Our self-image is supposed to be a learning, flexible system, and not a rusty iron wall, rigid and inaccessible.
It is fine to listen, to cast doubt, to learn a different way or to return to an old one.
Others can recommend, but you are your own only boss. The final decisions are yours. The results are your responsibility.
Take the sceptre in your hands. You will be fine.