Why does talking about money in my family always blow up emotionally?

Family money conversations explode because everyone at the table is talking about something different. Some people are talking about dollars. Most people are talking about identity, fairness, perceived favor, or the decades of unspoken expectations the money sits on top of. Kris Kluver, in The Dysfunctional Family Office, names this directly. Wealth is rarely about dollars. It's about identity, hope, pain, expectation, fear, and control. The legal advisors usually don't see this layer. The family lives in it every day. Until both layers are surfaced and addressed together, every financial conversation in the family will detonate something else. The fix isn't more spreadsheets. It's making space for the second layer to be named out loud.