There was an excellent thread about "other behaviors" and the extreme sacrafice that some long term members make, rather than taking a drink. Can it be said that they relapsed?
If I look at my life - any time I drank after a period of sobriety, it began long before the actual drink. I believe alcoholism to be rooted in spiritual sickness - You can get back to being a sick alcoholic who just hasn't taken in a drink in a long time, pretty worthless to others I would think.
I guess it could be said that there was no relapse without the drink, as long as we have a fixed definition of relapse as being "consumption of alcohol after a period of abstinence". There are worse things that can happen sober...and I hate to see the message of this thread get lost in semantics.
A return to the condition of life listed in the second paragraph on page 52, which has nothing to do with drinking -is a pretty good gauge of return to a spiritually sick condition (relapse). You might not need to take a newcomer chip or change your sobriety date, but I would suggest going back to step one as opposed to "don't drink no matter what".
That 'no matter what' can mean death.