श्वशुरान्सुहृदश्चैव सेनयोरुभयोरपि।तान्समीक्ष्य स कौन्तेयः सर्वान्बन्धूनवस्थितान्॥
tān samīkṣya sa kaunteyaḥ sarvān bandhūn avasthitānkṛpayā parayāviṣṭo viṣīdann idam abravīt
Word by word
The verse says
Seeing all these kinsmen standing there, the son of Kunti was overcome with deep pity, and in sorrow he said this.
In plain words
And he breaks.
The word for what overcomes him is kṛpā — pity, compassion, tenderness. Not fear. Not doubt about the cause. He is undone by something that would ordinarily be counted a virtue.
That is what makes this hard. If Arjuna had lost his nerve, the answer would be simple. He has lost it to compassion.
Where you've felt this · in parenting
Preparing to be firm with someone who has let you down badly, and then noticing how thin their wrists have got. Everything you were right about stays true. You just cannot say it in the way you planned any more.
Going deeper
Everything turns on that word kṛpā, and the Gita never once suggests Arjuna was wrong to feel it.
This is important, because the book is often summarised as Krishna telling Arjuna to toughen up and fight. It is not that. Compassion for all beings is praised throughout — Chapter 12 lists karuṇa, kindness, among the marks of the people dearest to Krishna. Arjuna is feeling the right thing.
The problem is what the feeling is doing to him. It has arrived mixed with something else: a picture of himself as the one who would be killing them, a horror at his own hand in it. That is why he cannot move. Not pure compassion, but compassion tangled up with ownership — my people, my doing, my guilt.
Krishna's work over the next seventeen chapters is not to remove the tenderness. It is to separate it from the knot of self that has it paralysed. The compassion survives. In fact it grows. What goes is the part of Arjuna that had claimed the whole field as his own responsibility.