The "strong" sapir-whorf hypothesis, that cognitive and behavioral categories are limited by linguistic ones, is thoroughly discredited. At most they may influence our perceptions, but they do not constrain them.

Linguistics is one of the fields where HN consensus goes directly against the scholarly mainstream of the discipline for what I mostly find to be ideological reasons. So hopefully this isn't that and you're just a bit out of date. But there's been a big reevaluation of this in the last twenty years and virtually no contemporary working linguists represent the strong relative view anymore. It simply did not consistently produce useful results and has been abandoned.