A specialized charged‐particle radiotherapy technique developed at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) is applied to patients with lesions abutting or surrounding the spinal cord or brain stem. This technique divides the target into two parts, one partially surrounding the critical structure (brain stem or spinal cord) and a second excluding the critical structure and abutting the first portion of the target. Compensators are used to conform the dose distribution to the distal surface of the target. This technique represents a novel approach in treating unresectable or residual tumors surrounding the spinal cord or brain stem. Since the placement of the patient with respect to beam‐shaping devices is critical for divided‐target treatments, a method for calculating dose distributions reflecting random patient motion is proposed, and the effects of random patient motion are studied for two divided‐target patient examples. Dose‐volume histograms and a normal‐tissue complication probability model are used in this analysis. For the patients considered in this study, the normal‐tissue‐complication probability model predicts that random patient motion less than or equal to 0.2 cm is tolerable in terms of spinal cord complications.