My personal experience has been that trying to make sense of the past is a near impossible task, at least for me. Of course, in my case, I'm old & the past is fading farther-&-farther into the rear-view mirror, so to speak. I think about it pretty regularly though. But every time I begin to think, perhaps, I have begun to develop some understanding of it, something else occurs to me that causes me to decide what I had concluded was simply a chimera. Then I'm right back where I started from.