Editor adds line-break after opening paragraph

I'm pulling data from a database and inserting it into a textarea which is replaced with the CKEditor.

window.onload = function(){
        CKEDITOR.replace( 'page_content' );
 };

The one problem that I have though is that it always creates a paragraph around the content and adds a line-break after the paragraph opening and after the ending of the paragraph.

<p><br />Content goes in here</p><br />

This extra line-breaks doesn't show up in the editor even if you view the source, in the source view it looks like this,

<p>
     Content goes in here</p>

Then when you submit the content it adds the extra line-breaks like in the first example.

This is extremely annoying, is there anyway to fix this?
1) It's stupid.
2) It breaks the layout by adding a bunch of extra white-space which looks horrible ATM.
3) Did I mention it's stupid?