Text escaping / unescaping help

[eluser]Sceneshift[/eluser]
I hate myself for asking this question, but I can't seem to find a solution.

I have a text area, I am adding the contents to a database using active record. It's escaping all the apostrophes and adding \n's for line breaks, which is fine. I am happy with that.

How do I then take that data out of the database and display it in a nice manner? I tried using the typography helper, but it obviously doesn't work in conjunction with stripslashes which I need because of the escaped apostrophes.

Sorry for the stupid question!