Humans don't like guilt. That doesn't mean we naturally strive for confidence, as avoidance of guilt can be polar opposite of having confidence. We just like to rationalize away out mistakes to keep our egos safe.

Women are in a privileged position when it comes to this, because society often allows us to ignore the part we played in negative outcomes. Men gentlemanly take the blame or just keep quiet because they hope we'll stop complaining sooner if they don't escalate it. Other women identify with us and help us pin the blame elsewhere so they too would feel better about themselves. Men may well have their version of this (nice guy syndrome, complaining about their wives and lives etc), but I'm focusing on this as it's relevant to us and it's what I'm more familiar with.

While there are many defense mechanisms that you may use in healthy and unhealthy manners to deal with life and responsibilities, we'll be focusing on projection of blame for this post.

External Projection of Blame

This is the most common type of projection. If you find yourself complaining about life being unfair and people treating you poorly often, you're likely indulging in this. If used extensively, this may lead to paranoia about other people purposefully conspiring against you.

It's very common for women to pin down blame on their problems in the relationship on the SOs. This is one of the arguments I have the most often with women complaining to me when I try to help them out to change their outlook and better themselves. There's no reason to get angry at other people ever. We don't all have the same sense of morality, they obviously don't feel like they owe you what you think they owe you and the reason you expected them to act up to your expectations in the first place is that you had the wrong expectations. You must learn not to base your expectations of people on your own sense of right and wrong or, worse, entitlement, and instead base it on realistic observations of how these people act. Once you internalize this concept and start thinking like this, you'll notice your anger at other people dissipate. When they do something unexpected and hurt you, you'll know it's on you for not judging their personalities well enough.

This is a very good mindset for vetting a partner, but also preserving relationships. First of all, knowing your partner well and having realistic expectations leads to way more satisfaction with the relationship and knowing your boundaries clearly and rationally allows you not to change them with your emotional swings and know when they've truly been stepped over. On top of that, it allows you to assume responsibility for your own mistakes and think about what you could have done to mitigate the situation and lessen the impact of your partner's flaws on the relationship, instead of focusing on what they could have done. You only have power over your own actions and bettering yourself will create a positive atmosphere in the relationship where your partner can flourish too. Sometimes, you'll realize that no amount of working on yourself will make you satisfied with them and that you've simply made a poor choice while vetting, but at least you'll know that you did your best and that they truly weren't for you and not just being stressed by your nagging and pressuring to improve.

Accepting your mistakes doesn't mean not being confident. While guilt, pride and confidence are highly correlated, they're not one and the same. A confident person who can't accept their mistakes is prideful and thus not confident enough to face their flaws, afraid that that would shatter their ego.

If you recognize yourself extremely in this category, you may be an abuser with anger management issues. You may subconsciously seek out people with victim personalities whose sense of guilt pushes them to provoke you and cause you to further punish them and convince them they're unworthy. These sort of relationships will lead you to a lifetime of anger and dissatisfaction, please seek professional help to overcome this. You may also have NPD, although this is considerably more rare.

Internal Projection of Blame

Now, this may seem counter-intuitive. How can you project blame on yourself? Isn't that just accepting blame? Well, yes and no. People who keep thinking they're stupid every time they make a mistake, that they're useless every time they fail to accomplish something, that they're not worth their partner every time they do something nice for them or forgive them a mistake, aren't just accepting blame, they're projecting it on a picture of themselves that they see as an inevitability.

Most people aren't completely stupid, useless or not worth loving by anyone. But when they don't get success and validation they secretly wish for, they turn to blaming themselves in a way that doesn't motivate self-improvement. They may pin it down on genetics or traumatic past or otherwise on something that's inevitable or just really almost impossible to change. They may "try" changing, encounter these negative behaviors again despite their best effort, conclude it isn't working at all and they'll forever be the same person they are now.

They aren't truly accepting responsibility, as they're unwilling to admit to themselves that they can change their lives. If they're not changing for the better, but it's impossible anyway, there's no responsibility in the equation. Of course, since this is just a rationalization to make them feel better on the surface, they'll always have a deep-ingrained sense of guilt and shame, but they won't realize it's coming from not taking responsibility for their own future, they'll think it's just a product of their awful actions in and of themselves. But do we feel guilt for awful actions that were truly inevitable? If you stole from a rich person who didn't really need it in order to eat while starving, would the sense of guilt overwhelm you and destroy your confidence? No. The reason their guilt eats them out from the inside is that deep down they know they can change.

Accepting responsibility for your actions means vetting a better partner, as your deep-ingrained sense of guilt won't guide you to think you don't deserve a great person or that you deserve punishment (an abuser). It also means preserving the relationship better through acknowledging that you can really work on your flaws and make yourself a better person, but also that you're a decent person and worth loving as you are right now. If you think you're too far away from your maximum potential, perhaps you can hold on on relationships until you approach it enough to be able to get the best partner you can, but that doesn't mean that you don't deserve anybody loving you right now, just that you may be saving yourself for better suitors.

Don't give yourself up to self-pity and self-punishment. It might be hard at first, but clench your teeth and allow yourself to see your true potential and aspire to acquire it.

As a side note, this mentality may be prevalent among women who easily accept AWALT and try to use it as an excuse for their behavior. While you may never be a NAWALT, striving to be better is necessary. It's also common to pin your traits down to things like MBTI and similar personality traits or astrology and form sort of a circlejerk of people fixated on their mistakes almost as if they're celebrating them, but actually complaining about them to each other. Beware of such communities, as it is really easy to be dragged into such behavior.

If you recognize yourself in a lot of these descriptions, but you're always sincerely told about how sweet you are and how you're the opposite of your own impressions of you, you may have Impostor Syndrome, whereby you end up blaming yourself for all the negative things in your life, but attributing all of your achievements to external factors and influences. The advice and analysis above apply to you as well, but your lack of confidence likely stems from deeper issues than simple fear of responsibility and it'll take you an extra mile to overcome this. It's especially important for you not to get discouraged and to remember that your flaws aren't innate and inescapable and even if they are, you can still mitigate them to the best of your ability.

If you recognize yourself extremely in this category you may have pathological victim personality due to previous abusive experiences in relationships or not being given a good model of a healthy relationship through your parents. This may cause you to subconsciously seek out abusers to punish yourself or to have that sense of depending on someone, rather than on your "unworthy" self give you security. You should seek out professional help and not allow this get out of hand.

Conclusion

While men and women are both prone to seeking validation, women might be more likely to actually get it through projecting blame. This is something to be aware of, recognize in our thought patterns and avoid. A process to learning boundaries of healthy and psychologically required levels of this defense mechanism and unacceptable ones that lead us to negative behaviors is long and it's important to muster the courage to apologize to those affected and forgive yourself, safe in the knowledge that you're on the right path as long as you have the willpower to get yourself there.

TL;DR: Don't let yourself blame others for your mistakes nor think that they're an innate part of you and that you can't improve.