Creative Accompaniment provides therapy, group training, and support to professionals who help those in crisis.
Our group training and facilitation enables professionals and volunteers to resiliently support themselves and others when called to help families and children through the loss of a family member.
Iván Gómez García, director of Creative Accompaniment, also a psychologist and gestalt therapist, has been working for many years with bereaved children and families.
Exploring the fear of death and connecting with self-love can make us feel less fearful and more in contact with life. We feel lucky to have received these teachings ourselves and are inspired to share them with others.
A key aspect of our work is creating a space of healing and acceptance. This foundation helps us expand our ability to connect with ourselves and grow our capacity to help those in need.
We pride our focus on quality over quantity, bringing a therapeutic learning experience that encourages deep listening. When you can listen deeply to your own experience, you gain presence and attention to the details that matter in life.
Our group training is for those who want to grow personally and professionally to better help children and families going through grief or facing other sudden life changes.
What you will learn in this article:
- The meaning of Creative Accompaniment
- Creative Accompaniments history
- How our approach benefits others
- Testimonials from our community
- How you can learn and grow with us
- Organisations we have worked with
- Our belief system
- Our value system
The unique meaning of Creative Accompaniment
Our experience working with children and families at the end of life helped us develop a way of working that honours each moment of life.
Over the years, we have realised that our presence makes a difference in crisis if we allow the creative process of curiosity and acceptance to evolve. Even in challenging situations, if we do this human beings can see things from a new perspective.
The two words of our name are inspired by our learnings in these processes….
ACCOMPANIMENT
Just as music is the art of playing along, our role as health care professionals is that of a companion, or like musicians would say, “a collaborative artist”. The severely ill child and family can ask questions or share their fears and concerns with us. At the same time, the nurse, doctor, or psychologist accompanies them so that the mood is set for constructive open conversation.
CREATIVE
Creativity is when we use what already exists and change it into something unpredictable. As a result, our actions appear new, and they are beneficial for those we look after. Creativity is one of the most important means we have as human beings of freeing ourselves from our conditional responses and stepping aside from our habitual options.
Our approach helps to encourage a feeling of internal freedom, so you can expand your creativity. It allows you to let go of unfinished businesses, so you can live in the present. Witnessing the transformation of people as they go through our courses is rewarding; it is beautiful to see them find, appreciate and share a contagious authenticity.
During our training, you will experience a process that takes you from emotional tension and resistance towards rewarding and fun achievement. Our courses are not only informative, but they also teach you practices that promote internal change, like meditation or breathwork.
We pay attention to the crucial details of our work, creating unique programmes adapted to the needs of our participants. We design the aesthetic, theatre, music, and rituals used in our work, especially for these individual.
When I started to work with children who had lost an important person in their lives, I had a great motivation to help each of them. I was also fortunate that I learned with great teachers. Who offered me a mirror to look inside, gain awareness, and incorporate new professional approaches that transformed my good intentions into practice.
Now is the time to offer what I received to others.
Our history:
Now we have put the term creative accompaniment into the context of the work we do. I’d like to tell you a bit more about our early days because we have come a long way since then.
Rubén Bild developed the term Creative Accompaniment after he qualified as a psychoanalyst, trained by Anna Freud. He is a pioneer of paediatric palliative care in Spain and Argentina. Over the last 20 years, Rubén Bild and Iván Gómez García have trained many health care professionals and teams worldwide. They specialise in working with children and families going through illnesses, traumas, and losses. During this period, Rubén and Iván have helped people in Spain, Argentina, Costa Rica, Hungary, India, and Slovakia, just to mention a few.
How our approach can bring well-being to many lives
Through the years and countless experiences, we noticed that the principles of Creative Accompaniment, that we created to help people at the end of life and during grief, were also beneficial to others. They could help anyone else who wishes to connect deeply with a joyful and meaningful life.
Testimonials:
“It has been an intense and enriching experience. I managed to enter feared areas of myself, clearing doubts and finding new ways to make my life more pleasant and meaningful. I got rid of years of living in an emotional cage, and I felt secure to open to the unknown. Rubén and Iván gave me the confidence to do so.”
Alexia
“Thank you for this beautiful weekend, for the useful programme, your care and your time sharing memories of a good time we had with people who are no longer with us. I discovered the inner strength that will allow me to live with a brighter and positive attitude. I know I am not alone. I am happy and grateful you are doing this job.”
Therapeutic weekend for bereaved families, Podkylava, Slovakia
How you can learn and grow with us:
These days we provide group training and support to professionals helping those in crisis. Our working model helps to get in contact with deep feelings and gain awareness of inner resources to help others more effectively and sustainably.
To be a bit more specific, here are the services we provide:
Child Grief Support Education:
Online training that expands your capacity to help children through grief by processing your unresolved loss and learning a professional approach.
Seminars on paediatric palliative care:
A space for mutual interaction and sharing, delivered with a lecturer’s expertise that facilitate s professional and personal growth.
Workshop: The Art of Living Well:
A residential workshop that explores the fear of death, ways to say goodbye and how to connect with compassion and love.
Course on Group Dynamics:
Designed for psychotherapists interested to expand their knowledge and expertise working with groups.
Individual and Group Psychotherapy:
Psychotherapy is a creative space where you, with the help of a professional, will be able to unblock internal conflicts and find new healthy ways to enjoy life.
If you are interested in any of the above, feel free to contact us to inquire about learning with us or engaging our support.
Organisations we have worked with:
Summer Camp in Slovakia (2013)
Plamienok Slovak Hospice for Children:
The journey started many years ago with Plamienok Slovak Hospice for Children. We have been working together Since 2003. What began with teaching the staff in clinical work has become a friendship, and a strong bond was created working on exciting and valuable projects together. Some projects involved fundraising, training the staff, summer camps for children, therapeutic weekends for bereaved families, supervision, and clinical work. Going to Bratislava does not feel like a new country anymore, but it feels like going home. We have been involved in several projects. We have been consciously building together for so long that we feel part of something extraordinary.
Daruieste Viata Association Bucharest Romania:
Doing workshop in Constança (2017)
We have been invited to Romania to train oncologists and health care, professionals. We help them provide better services in the country’s highly expanding and rapidly developing health care facilities. Our first workshop was in the mountains of Sinaia, which was repeated several times until we decided to expand it into an advanced course. During this time, we gave 3-day workshops all around Romania, including Timișoara, Constança, and the region of Transylvania. The vital determination of the health care professionals, their desire to learn and improve as much as possible, seemed evident to us from the very beginning. Our respect goes to all these people who work hard nonstop and fight for a better future. It was an honour working with Carmen Uscatu.
Foundation Warsaw Hospice for Children:
Preparation time before the workshop in Poland
We have a long history of doing workshops in Poland. Initially, Mr Bild went to different hospices around Poland — in cities like Poznań or Warsaw — before Iván Gómez joined Mr Bild’s team. In 2002 we travelled to Lowicz, where we held 2 courses with 35 people, each organised by the Foundation Warsaw Hospice for Children, a pioneer Hospice for children in Poland in the early 2000s. We trained the staff, including all nurses and healthcare professionals interested in learning more about palliative care. The courses were mentally challenging for both sides. In Rynia 2004, we run a 5-day workshop on the therapeutic use of silence, including doing different exercises and dynamics to improve communication, open the heart, and feel more compassionate without words. It was an internal journey for everyone, where new emotions were appearing and changing ceaselessly. The inner change was inevitable, creating harmony within us and the experts from all over Poland.
Valencian School for Health Care professionals:
We have provided countless hours of training courses in paediatric palliative care to the Valencian community. This was a massive success for us. We repeatedly held this course for 12 years with more than 300 participants, including health care professionals, nurses, doctors, psychologists, social workers, physiotherapists around Valencia and several other parts of Spain.
Preparing for the training course in Valencia
In the beginning, the courses started as in-person workshops. However, it was eventually developed into a mainly online format, with theoretical parts through our web page and 4 hour-long workshops that demonstrated effective communication techniques.
The course was remarkable and gratifying for us. Not only because it was intense, lasting for 2 months at 100 hours in total, but more so because we could give something back to our community.
We believe:
We need to keep growing: We believe there is a call for self-growth and awareness in the World. People are trying to find a new way of living with more understanding, and this is what we want to contribute towards.
Connect With Your Heart: We believe in the importance to live from the connection to your heart and spirituality. Connecting with your heart and inner wisdom is the main foundation to living a fully satisfied life. When we connect to our heart and listen to our voice of wisdom, we allow ourselves to be fully alive. We can freely express our creativity from this place of compassionate presence.
Come Back to Your Intuition: We believe in the ability and power of listening to an internal voice. We all have inner wisdom drawn from our journey in life, but we can sometimes be confused and have difficulty hearing it. In these times, we need help returning to it.
Generously Share Your Gifts: We believe we can make the best use of our gifts by generously offering them to others. When you are more connected to yourself, you are more generous to share your gifts with others in need.
Our values:
Love: Because without love, it is impossible to share our teachings and knowledge.
Honesty: It is essential to say what you want to say and how you feel to let creativity arise.
Care with loving attention: We need to pay attention to the details of how we care for those who we are helping so that our actions imply love and care for them.
Find peace inside: All of our work is based on finding our inner peace to learn and feel well with others who need it.
That is for this week’s blog post!
If you want to know more about Creative Accompaniment, sign up to our mailing here or visit our website www.emotional-growth.com/child-grief-support-education.
If you want to indulge yourself more deeply in what we do and what Creative Accompaniment is about. In that case, you can read the book by Iván and Ruben. An Unwanted Journey: Creative Accompaniment in Paediatric Palliative Care by Ruben Bild and Iván Gómez García.
Thank You for Reading,
Iván Gómez García
Director of Creative Accompaniment
Psychologist expert in Psycho-Oncology and Palliative Care
Gestalt Psychotherapist
“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to
embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer
meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in
movement, there is life, and in change, there is power.”
Alan Cohen
