When do you know if your situation was ‘big’ enough to be considered early trauma?

There are often big events that are traumatic, even though they have been normalized and may not seem big by society’s standards. Things like circumcision, early surgeries or severe illness, choking on food – these are all pretty big events to a young system. But more often in our society it is the things that don’t seem ‘big’ at all, that have a serious impact on the nervous system – parents who are chronically stressed (that’s just ‘normal’, right?), parents with unresolved trauma, or who don’t like each other, who fight a lot in the presence of their kids, who are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, or who are separated and uncommunicative – all of these things are quite common and not usually considered traumatic, but they almost always are. This is a good article to read on this subject.