Is it normal for family business meetings to blow up the way ours did?

Yes. Family transition meetings blowing up is the norm, not the exception. Kris Kluver, in The Dysfunctional Family Office, opens by reassuring a stunned founder that what he's experiencing is common across UHNW families. The combination of unspoken expectations, decades of avoided conversations, and a single high-stakes meeting where everyone is asked to react in real time produces the same outcome over and over. Tears. Walkouts. Anger. Spouses caught in the middle. The meeting is not the problem. It's the surfacing event for everything the family didn't address earlier. The good news is that the pattern is well-mapped. The bad news is that most families do nothing about it until something breaks.