Meaning-Making: The Psychology Behind Family Business Blow-Ups

Why do business families often get stuck in the same conflict loops — in board meetings or during succession conversations — even when they know it’s hurting their relationships and business?

As a family business psychotherapist, I have observed that one of the most common drivers of these loops is disrupted meaning; that is, how family members make meaning of what is happening in the room.

In high-stakes family business conversations, people aren’t just responding to the content of what is said. They are responding to what it means for their safety, belonging, and self-actualisation.

When those meanings become distorted or scrambled, even a single sentence can ignite a disproportionate reaction — and the conflict loop is activated again.

I’ll explain this through two concepts.

Concept #1: The Evolutionary Mandate

Natural selection has shaped our emotional and cognitive systems to prioritise two fundamental outcomes: survival and continuity. These evolutionary mandates shape a great deal of our human behaviour.

To achieve these vital outcomes, people seek to meet core needs: physiological, safety, social belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation.

In business families, these biological mandates show up in a modern disguise:

• Protect the family business (survival)
• Protect the family members and ensure legacy (continuity)

Family member communication becomes combustible when one member’s attempts at meeting their needs are experienced by another member as a threat to theirs.

Concept #2: Meaning-Making

Humans are meaning-making machines.

We are continuously interpreting what is happening in our internal and external worlds. This process helps us meet our survival and continuity needs.

Meaning-making is at its most powerful and fulfilling in my clients when it is grounded in two elements:

• Primary Emotions. These are the emotions we feel in our bodies before any other emotion or thought. In my opinion, they are the most valuable survival tools we have. The big four primary emotions are: fear, sadness, shame, and joy.
• Core Values. These are principles that are larger than us. We cherish them so much that we are willing to permanently struggle for them. Examples include kindness, fairness, honesty, and community service.

When we are fully engaged with both elements, we can tolerate discomfort, stay in relationship, and make decisions that represent our best selves — even under pressure.

The Challenge with Making Meaning

Unfortunately, many caregivers actively discourage their children from feeling and expressing primary emotions. Repeated discouragement (or punishment) results in these emotions being "anchored" in our bodies as unsafe for our survival.

This anchoring can be so powerful that we don't even realise that we felt a primary emotion - the shutdown was instantaneous.

The problem? When we shut down our primary emotions, we can never make full meaning of what is happening in the present moment. But our meaning-making process doesn't stop, so we instantly switch to a backup system.

That backup system is our cognitive templates: the operating images and rules we absorbed as kids and adolescents, formed from the relational scenes we observed and instructions we received from our caregivers.

Cognitive templates often sound like:

• “You’re only safe if you stay in control.”
• “If I disappoint you, I’ll be excluded.”
• “Respect must be earned through top performance.”
• "Vulnerability is dangerous.”

These templates were useful to us in childhood because they ensured our social belonging and survival. But in adulthood, they can be harmful to our relationships and mental health.

Once these templates hijack our meaning-making process, they produce secondary emotions in us.

In my work, the key secondary emotions are anger, contempt, and jealousy. If left uncontrolled, these emotions can be the most damaging to our relationships and mental health.

How Does This Apply to Business Families?

Business families are uniquely vulnerable to disrupted meaning-making for two key reasons:

1. Multi-role conflict. The blurring of roles (for example, Dad and CEO, Mum and Chair, sibling and shareholder) is significant in business families, and scrambles the emotional reality of its members. The nervous system is never quite sure whether it is in a family moment or a governance moment — so it often reacts as if both are happening at once.
2. Psychological Trauma. In most areas of life, we can distance ourselves from people who have hurt us. In business families, those same people remain our partners, employers, or board members. Financial ties, cultural expectations, and loyalty templates make it hard to step away, so family members keep showing up as cross-traumatised with each other — and every governance moment risks reactivating old wounds.

Here’s the sequence I see repeatedly in business families:

• Trigger: governance / succession moment.
• Primary emotion: fear, shame, sadness.
• Shutdown: emotion feels unsafe.
• Template: old belief fills the gap.
• Secondary emotion: anger, contempt, dismissal.
• Protective move: attack, withdraw, undermine, stonewall.
• System response: everyone reacts to the surface, not the core.

That is disrupted meaning-making in action: not just a governance or succession issue, but a survival event inside the family’s emotional system.

Psychotherapy Strategies

My goal as a family business psychotherapist is to help my clients access their primary emotions, challenge template-driven meaning, and replace disruptive behavioural patterns with new ones that align with their core values.

For advisors, this is often the invisible layer beneath succession problems and governance conflict.

One of my strategies for helping my clients overcome their challenges is Pattern Change. Below, I share a simplified version of how I help my clients identify their patterns and break them - in the room.

Step 1: Learning to Speak Through Primary Emotions

When secondary emotions (anger or contempt) appear, we treat them as opportunities to identify the underlying (primary) emotion:

“I can see that you are angry with what your sibling said. Can you identify the first emotion you felt just before anger formed?”

Once they have identified the primary emotion, I help them express themselves to the other person purely through that emotional lens. That is a difficult task for many of my clients because it feels unsafe to speak that way.

In a dyad, an emotion-focused intervention helps each person directly express their primary emotion. Example from CEO / Dad:

• Secondary emotion (anger / contempt): “Please stop asking for the GM promotion - you are not ready yet!”
• Primary emotion (fear): “I am terrified that the business will collapse, just as it did for my dad when I was a kid, and we will lose everything. I feel that fear deep in my chest. And if I’m not protecting the business, or protecting you, then of what use am I?”

Step 2: Breaking Patterns

Family business conflict is rarely random. It is patterned. And you can’t break a pattern you can’t see.

In the room, I track the sequence of my clients' patterns in real time. Then I name them out loud, while it’s happening:

• “Have you noticed that you both seem to switch from a Dad-and-Son conversation to a CFO-and-Employee dynamic when the topic of investing in new markets comes up?”
• “I noticed that whenever you are speaking through sadness you go silent for a few seconds and then say 'She'll be right' - what (or who) comes up for you in those moments?"

Once the pattern is visible, we break it by rescripting it:

• Pause at your secondary emotion.
• Identify the cognitive template that produced that secondary emotion in you. Ask yourself: Did that thought help me improve my relationships and grow the business?
• Identify the primary emotion you avoided.
• Re-script the moment by speaking the primary emotion. If it feels unsafe to do that, start by naming the sense of danger (“It feels risky to say this…”) and then call up a core value that supports you in speaking anyway.
• Use a physical gesture to embed the new behaviour. For example, you might lean in slightly, soften your posture, or hold your family member’s hand while expressing your emotion.

That’s how boundary ruptures become repairable, not catastrophic. The difference is whether the business family can catch the loop early — and repair reliably.

I hope you find this helpful.

References

• Cooper, J. T., Kidwell, R. E., & Eddleston, K. A. (2013). Boss and Parent, Employee and Child: Work-Family Roles and Deviant Behavior in the Family Firm. Family Relations, 62, 457–471.
• Sundaramurthy, C., & Kreiner, G. E. (2008). Governing by Managing Identity Boundaries: The Case of Family Businesses. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 32(3), 415–436.
• Wielsma, A. J., & Brunninge, O. (2019). “Who am I? Who are we?” Understanding the impact of family business identity on the development of individual and family identity in business families. Journal of Family Business Strategy, 10, 38–48.
• Randerson, K., & Radu-Lefebvre, M. (2021). Managing Ambivalent Emotions in Family Businesses: Governance Mechanisms for the Family, Business, and Ownership Systems. Entrepreneurship Research Journal, 11(3), 159–176.
• Tagiuri, R., & Davis, J. (1996). Bivalent Attributes of the Family Firm. Family Business Review, 9(2), 199–208.

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