Donald Trump, King of the Dry Drunks.
And it Ain’t about the alcohol or lack thereof.
by Becky Whetstone, Ph.D. LMFT, LPC
In a world hungry for inside information about President Donald Trump, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles ordered up an all-you-can-eat buffet: 11 interviews about life in the Trump White House with respected reporter Chris Whipple of Vanity Fair magazine, published this month.
Wiles, the daughter of Pat Summerall, the late sportscaster, says her dad was an alcoholic, and Trump’s viewpoints, beliefs, and actions are a lot like her father’s. In her rundown of White House personalities, she described her boss as a dry drunk, as if everyone knew what that meant.
Since they don’t, I thought I would take it upon myself to explain it.
The Discovery of the Addictive Personality.
In the 1970s and 80s, Pia Mellody, a nurse at the Meadows Behavioral Health Center in Wickenburg, Arizona, was tasked with figuring out how to help addicts who were in the program there. She didn’t want to, but there was no one else, and her discoveries would change the trauma and recovery world forever.
Over many years, she interviewed thousands of addicts and their families and concluded that all of them had the same emotional disabilities, only some of them drank.
Childhood developmental trauma was the cause, she found, also coming to understand how easy it is to get traumatized in childhood — any scolding or shaming, hitting, being compared to someone else, neglect, not being nurtured, the list goes on and on. The most explicit criterion, she famously said, was “Anything that happened in childhood that was less than nurturing.”
Some families are abusive, but even well-intended families and caretakers can be the primary source of a child’s trauma. If someone else doesn’t cause it, children will do it to themselves by deciding they aren’t good enough on their own: Billy is smarter than I am, she is a better athlete, and I wasn’t picked for the team. This happens so much that most people have been traumatized thousands of times by the time they grow up.
The entire dysfunctional process takes hold, she said, the moment a child decides they aren’t good enough, are defective, don’t measure up, are different, aren’t worthy, don’t fit in, aren’t lovable, or cannot be what their caretakers and the culture expect them to be.
Pia called this phenomenon, toxic shame, and almost every adult carries it as their dirty little secret revealed to no one until they decide to do something about it.
The symptoms of toxic shame show up in many ways. We create false personas to try to be who we think others want us to be, we become pleasers, overachievers, perfectionists, and overcompensate, hide, and pretend we’re okay when we aren’t.
The five areas we become emotionally disabled are:
1. Self-esteem. Toxic shame/not good enough v. Grandiosity/better than.
2. Boundaries. No boundaries to restrain or protect self v. Walled off.
3. Perception/reality. Unable to discern reality accurately. Examples: Putting people on pedestals or demonizing them, making up inaccurate meanings, believing things that aren’t true or provable, telling yourself you are better than or less than others.
4. Dependency. Dependent on other adults v. Anti-dependent, needless & wantless.
5. Moderation. Lack of self-control v. Out of control with being in control.
Looking at this list, Donald Trump’s self-esteem is grandiose; he is boundaryless, his perception is entirely inaccurate and creates his own false reality, he is dependent on others, and what they think of him and do for him. Still, he is emotionally dependent and in romantic relationships, and he both lacks self-control and is out of control in controlling others.
Whether a person drinks or not, they will have disabilities in a few or all of these categories unless they seek to go into recovery from doing trauma work. The disabilities are most apparent in romantic relationships, but Donald Trump is such a public character that they are easy to spot in all areas of his life.
What it is to be a dry drunk.
Plenty of people who have addictions may stop using alcohol, drugs, or objects of their obsessions. Still, without trauma treatment through a 12-step or long-term therapy program, the behaviors will continue.
A dry drunk is someone who has stopped drinking but has not done the deeper emotional and psychological work required for recovery. Or, in the case of Donald Trump, who never drank, he has all the same characteristics as if he had.
The alcohol is gone. Or it never was.
The patterns remain.
Addiction is rarely just about substances. It’s about how a person copes with stress, emotions, relationships, and responsibility. When alcohol was the primary coping tool, emotional growth often stalled at the age when heavy drinking began.
Pia Mellody called all the negative behaviors that result from toxic shame and codependence, though later she wished she had called it childhood developmental trauma, mainly because people misconstrue what the word codependence means and may say they don’t have it, when in reality, they do. To learn more, read her book, Facing Codependence.*
Why some people with toxic shame have addictions, and others don’t.
People who drink and use drugs typically use them to avoid the emotional pain of feeling less than. They don’t get the job they wanted, which they wrongly process as evidence of not being good enough, and the emotional pain is so intense that they use medications to numb themselves. Non-addicts may feel the same type of emotional pain, but use other dysfunctional coping mechanisms such as numbing themselves, avoiding, compartmentalizing, controlling, anger, blaming, dissociating, and/or falling into depression and anxiety, and eventually, chronic illnesses.
The human brain is set to keep us alive and to keep us from suffering in any given moment. While it thinks it is helping us by numbing or dissociating, it ends up creating a whole new set of problems that hurt our ability to have healthy relationships.
In the end, all added up, the traits from childhood developmental trauma cause us to be emotionally immature. We get stunted at a young developmental age, usually when the toxic shame begins.
Here are a few easily recognizable patterns of emotional immaturity:
- Avoidance — difficulty tolerating discomfort, regulating emotions, or handling feedback. Will sit in misery and discomfort for long periods without action that could resolve it.
- Defensiveness — interpreting concerns as attacks and avoiding accountability.
- Control issues — using rigidity and dominance to manage anxiety.
- Victim mindset — focusing on perceived slights rather than the harm caused
- Low empathy — minimizing the impact of past behavior on loved ones
- Lack of self–care. Not dealing with or maintaining mind, spirit, and body issues.
- Vengefulness — An ability to harm others and not feel bad about it.
- Excuses and justifications. Rarely accept responsibility for harmful actions.
- The need to be good, perfect, right. Must maintain an image of perfection.
- Egomania. Acquires a sense of being valuable through external things like beauty, money, education, career, success, etc.
What recovery looks like.
Sobriety is a behavioral change.
Recovery is a character and relational change.
It is the difference between dealing with issues like a child or an adult.
True recovery involves:
Although Donald Trump was his father’s golden child, his relatives say, all golden children remain gold only so long as they go along with their parents’ program.
Trump was given a job to do by his father and was trained like a circus monkey to perform for his dad and not be seen as weak. Still, he has toxic shame underneath his façade of false grandiosity. His entire ability to value himself is built on whatever things his ego decides he must have to be good enough. If he lost those things, he would crumble into nothingness and likely have a mental breakdown.
I spent three long weekends in Arizona training with Pia Mellody herself, just as Trump was coming down the golden escalator. I asked her about him, and she said he was stunted at age 9, before he reached the stage of abstract thinking, so he remains a black-and-white thinker. She also said that he fits the profile of a 9-year-old schoolyard bully, with no feelings for who he harms.
Most children who become bullies were bullied themselves, usually by a parent. The trauma term for it is scapegoating.
Everything you see about Donald Trump’s pompous persona has nothing to do with who he really is underneath. He created it to get his ego what it desperately needs: validation that he is a special, unique person who can get whatever he wants when he wants it. He must have power and money to feel good enough. He must be able to control people. He is a spoiled and bratty child, and always will be, unless more people begin to see him as he really is, and his power drug is taken away.
Unfortunately, one reason Americans are so cynical is that most wealthy people can get away with being immature and abusing others, as he does, their entire lives, and few are ever stopped. Some of us hope to live long enough to see him, and others who abuse power when they have it, finally held accountable.
*Books recommended may pay us a small fee at no extra cost to you.
Becky Whetstone, Ph.D., is a marriage and family therapist and licensed professional counselor in Arkansas and an LMFT in Texas. She is the author of I (Think) I Want Out: What to Do When One of You Wants to End the Marriage, as well as The Congressman’s Wife, available only on Substack. Known as the Marriage Crisis Manager, sees individuals and couples worldwide via telehealth. She specializes in unhappy marriages, marriage crises, amicable divorces, and co-parenting and stepfamily issues.
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