A Different Perspective

It's a question of perspective: you can make something  - an emotion or an event -- seem enormous depending on whether your character is closely involved, or you can allow it to appear distant and insignificant if they are only peripheral. Sometimes, to get a sense of perspective, you need context too. In my cute little picture of Snow White,

(taken a while bumping about in a French lock) it is the presence of the flowers which give away the fact that she is only inches tall.  Without them, she could almost be lifesize.

Why not experiment with this in your writing. Play with the perspective of a scene to see how you can alter its significance.  What do you need to do to make it acutely important for one of your characters and negligible for another, and what effect does that have on the feelings of each of them?  Think of it as a kind of emotional engineering.  Remember, it is also a question of how close you as the writer want or are able to be to your work, because your distance (or otherwise) will have an effect on it as well.