A toxic environment, according to Gili, is a subjective feeling rather than something you can measure, and it’s different from one person to the next. The main sign she points to: negative behaviors that happen routinely, with no consequences and with nobody ever questioning them, until they turn into an accepted norm. She illustrates it with a plant that isn’t flowering: you don’t blame the plant, you check its environment and you change it. A toxic environment changes us far more easily than we change it, and even a good person can go downhill in the wrong place.
When a parent hangs up and then doesn’t answer for days as a punishment, Gili calls that genuine trauma, like telling someone, “You’re worth nothing.” When somebody keeps damaging your mental health, even if that somebody is family, setting boundaries can help, and sometimes distance really is the healthiest answer. Blood may be thicker than water, but mental health matters more. The order she suggests: first the inner cleaning work, because a toxic environment reflects your own fears and wounds, then try boundaries, and only if there is really no other choice, move away.
Being taken for a sucker, the way Gili sees it, isn’t giving in or keeping quiet. It’s the moment you let an outside event decide what happens inside you, and hand someone else control over your consciousness. The fear of being taken for a sucker is exactly what puts our automatic reactions in charge. There’s a short moment between the event and the reaction, and the choice lives inside it. A reaction that comes from the wound arrives fast, with no checking and no curiosity, while a reaction that comes from the soul doesn’t rush and doesn’t deny the pain, but it doesn’t turn that pain into the truth right away either. Most of the time we aren’t reacting to the event at all, but to an old pain, to a conclusion we reached back in childhood. Gevurah, in the language of Kabbalah, is restraint: the ability to stop for a moment and not let every emotion turn straight into an act. Her image comes from aikido: you don’t stop a blow with opposing force, you step aside and let the force go past.
People-pleasing is a pretty costume for fear, not kindness. A people-pleaser isn’t really connected to people. They worked out a way to please people out of fear of rejection, of criticism or of being abandoned, and the pattern was born in childhood, when they learned that it was safer to put other people’s needs before their own. Her tip for saying no without justifying yourself: start straight from the refusal and end on a positive note, for example “I can’t. I would have loved to. Thank you for the invitation.”