I disagree and think you must talk to your masters students.This culture of silence around advisor abuse is like some deeply disgusting masochistic cult. You must talk about your experiences with each other. Also we all need approval from those allegedly in charge but the sad truth is that you will have to learn to feel good about your work without it. Some advisors are stingy bastards with the chocolate box. Just find your chocolate in another shop/ make your own. Your work by the way sounds like it's going in a good way. I'm sure you'll be able to develop even stronger your own inner critic to help you with assessing your work but maybe a little later sending stuff out for publishing/ presenting at seminars etc allows you to get professional feedback. I wrote a paper that my advisor was so crappy about but I actually got applauded and got publishing requests when I presented the same thing at a conference. This need for approval from advisors might turn you into Gollum. Beware! The best advice with supervisors like yours is for you to not take them too seriously. They're a necessary part of an admin chain in this field as far as your work goes, just put up with them when you need to and stay focussed on your research.

As for the embarassment etc etc they betrayed your trust and exposed you when you were vulnerable and it is they who should be embarassed and feel ashamed not you. Your trust is however misplaced. Please don't trust them ever again. Get focussed on your work, develop your own inner critic, attend conferences/ seminars, even just to listen, read in your area widely, aim for publications on your own and always come back to why you want to do this research. Do try to create atleast a tiny support network of students you can talk to about these things or even someone outside. Please keep aside family problems while you focus on your work or take a year off to deal with that and then come back. Get a good therapist to help you keep boundaries with these things. Just one other person to talk to can make a difference. Your PhD is about your relationship with your work and with knowledge and learning not with the rats in the advisor chairs. Always remember that! Sending you lots of strength and support as you find your voice in your research again.

This is terrible and you should really just believe in yourself and your work. The worst position to be in is to crave their approval. In my experience they only give it to you when you are useful to them or if you are anyway insisting on making it with or without their approval. Cut out the emotional/ personal emails to them. they are not your friends and they are not mentors in the old sense of the world where a teacher was also a personal guide. If at all they encouraged it, it was to be able to have you at a weak position, which you seem to be in now. Also get a good analyst/ therapist that you can talk to, i would not have made it so far into my PhD without analytical support and a building a small network of strong student support. Students especially at research level are the most abused and exploited class in the world especially in terms of intellectual and emotional abuse. Don't become another victim. They treat it as a rat race and try to kill competition in this time by destroying many students. Don't aim for a 'good' relationship with them, aim for a professional one. Treat them as a class like you would the local politician, police and mafia in your area. You need to know how to communicate to get work done and be professional but these people are not your circle of support or warmth. At best they form strategic alliances at different junctures. Also you need to know your work better than anyone else. Find people you can trust to talk to about your difficulties and learn on your own too. Supervisors at this level don;t teach, they're more like patrol police or quality check trying their best to keep people out of the academia. But academic is the entire field of learning and it belongs to the students and tax payers ie rest of society. You have to be a lot more self-reliant than you sound now to survive.