Paragraphs or breaks in textareas

I can see that this question has been asked before, but I can’t see an answer, here.

When a user submits a listing, if I have custom fields that are textareas, there is no way to break up the submitted text blocks into paragraphs.

Obviously, I, as the admin, can do this from the admin side. However, it would be useful to have the ability to have breaks in text as submitted by the user.

And, I get that this is more of a WordPress issue than DirectoryPress issue.

At the same time, though, has anyone figured this one out? Is there a simple coding tweak? Is there a plug-in?

Thanks!