We were talking about this last night at a SMART Recovery meeting. Slips are (or can be) viewed a little differently. If you don't start back and it is an isolated incident, it is just a slip. So there are people who quit drinking/using 5 years ago but have had 2 slips. You don't lose credit for all the hard works you have done. There are some abusers of this that "slip" a little too often IMO, but it makes more sense to me than saying it is day one all over again for one slip after keeping clean a long time.