Welcome to the family, PathFinder!
Your situation with your massage therapist is very familiar to me. My undiagnosed H also tends to react strongly to anything he remotely perceives as rejection. A lot of it is just talk. (Can't tell you the number of times he's said he's going to completely cut off life-long friends, though he never follows through.)
How do you usually respond when he gets like that? I know, in my case, I was doing a lot of JADEing (Justify Argue Defend Explain), which seems like a logical, rational thing to do, but after coming here, I realized that in doing that, I was actually making things worse!
Keep posting!