Ever since two horrible events last week—the massacre at Virginia Tech and the brutal rape and torture of a Journalism student at Columbia University—I have had a hard time sitting down to write about The Secret. Not only because such ethereal musings seem frivolous in the face of such real nightmares, but also because of The Secret’s dirty little secret: Not only does it teach the law of attraction for good, but also for bad.

Here’s Secret Person Joe Vitale:

Everything that surrounds you right now in life, including things you’re complaining about, you’ve attracted. Now I know at first blush that’s going to be something that you hate to hear. You’re going to immediately say, “I didn’t attract the car accident. I didn’t attract this particular client who gives me a hard time. I didn’t particularly attract the debt.” And I’m here to be a little bit in your face and to say, yes, you did attract it. This is one of the hardest concepts to get, but once you’ve accepted it, it’s life transforming.

Hearing this statement on the video, and reading it later in the book, I was horrified. What does this guy mean, accidents are our fault? Accidents are, by definition, accidents. This concept of total individual responsibility has dangerous implications: it can make us feel all-powerful—omniscient even—which is exhilarating when what’s happening is good, potentially devastating when it isn’t. The Secret plays to both sides of narcissism.

Why would we be attracted—no pun intended—to a philosophy that assigns blame to the blameless? Aside from what might be a sense of masochistic martyrdom inherent to the new American character, I would also attribute it to our culture’s endemic solipsism. A terrible thing happened to them, but I am a positive thinker, so it cannot happen to me. It’s a mode of superstitious self-protection. Yet another way to differentiate us from them. Until we become one of them.

I have a particularly angry reaction to this tenet of The Secret—assigning responsibility to victims—because my little brother was devastatingly injured in a freak accident when he was 17. Force and geometry conspired to create a fall which put him in a coma for six weeks, and left him with deficits he’ll have to work around for the rest of his life.

Each member of my family has spent countless hours since my brother’s accident obsessing about how it might have been prevented. This is the behavior our self-help books, our therapists, and our friends have told us to extinguish. Second-guessing the cause of disaster is at the root of one of the most powerful post-traumatic paralytics: survivor guilt. Why would anyone want to assign blame for something that cannot be undone? Where’s the life-changing power in that?

I guess The Secret People would say, start living The Secret and things will change. By doing this, the gravely injured can expect a miracle! Consider this example from the book and DVD: A man crashes an airplane, crushing his spinal cord and breaking his first and second cervical vertebrae. He is paralyzed and on a ventilator. The doctors warn his family he will remain in a vegetative state.

The man, Morris Goodman, remembers:

That’s the picture they saw of me, but it didn’t matter what they thought. The main thing was what I thought. I pictured myself being a normal person again, walking out of that hospital.

The only thing I had to work with in the hospital was my mind, and once you have your mind, you can put things back together again.

I was hooked to a respirator and they said I’d never breathe on my own again because my diaphragm was destroyed. But a little voice kept saying to me, “Breathe deeply, breathe deeply.” And finally I was weaned from it. They were at a loss for an explanation.

I have no objection to encouraging the wounded to self-heal, but the idea that all healing derives from will assigns a sense of hopelessness and worthlessness to those who try to get better, but can’t. Should they live out the rest of their limited lives listening to one more voice tell them what their own conscience has probably been proposing ever since the day their life changed? That the shitty predicament they’re in is their fault?

Through my brother’s rehabilitation process, we met a few brain injury patients who experienced extraordinary recoveries. While my brother’s own recovery has been miraculous—he was not expected to survive the first few days after he was hurt—he has not regained all the function we hoped he would. Walking and talking remain extremely difficult for him eight years after his accident.

Within the brain injury community, those who defy grave prognoses, walking and talking immediately after coma, become deified. People like Bob Woodruff are rock stars, objects of adulation and envy. Of course you’re happy for their progress, but you can’t help but wonder what’s wrong with you. How much more powerless the already vanquished feel when others seem to possess some extraordinary healing power they lack.

Explained through the lens of The Secret—that these people wish better for themselves than those who don’t heal as well—these “inspirational” stories feel almost abusive to those who remain afflicted, creating envy and self-hate, not empowerment.

The key is not that The Secret People think tragedies are the faults of the victims—obviously that’s as absurd and simplistic a point of view as the old take on cancer. What’s problematic is the almost Nietzschian focus on the superhuman power of the individual. We all know what happens when people believe they’re gods.