Stung

This slip versus relapse stuff just sounds like minimizing the fact that someone drank again. When you're an alcoholic, one drop is too much. If you've had even one sip of alcohol then you've gone way, way too far outside of your recovery. (In fact, I was reading one of my husband's "Understanding Relapse" worksheets from rehab a few weeks ago and relapse is soooo not about alcohol or actually drinking, that's the very last step in a long series of relapse behaviors and thinking.) Any other details are meaningless, in my very humble opinion.

I wanted to add that sobriety based denial allows you to block the awareness of problems in recovery that lead to relapse, which is what I think calling a relapse a slip is. It's denial. Drinking is drinking is drinking.