Ah! I can’t make page breaks, and the wysiwyg editor keeps reverting them

My problem is that I want to add images to my blog. I’m using the rich-text wysiwyg editor to try and achieve this. What happens, though, is when I hit save, all the page breaks I’ve made contract until there are no spaces between pictures. I’m going insane! I tried the html tags [br /] and [br], but even they get cleared out as soon as I save or publish. The breaks are there, but some power greater than my own likes to omit them. I want a break between paragraphs and images instead of a contiguous blurb because everything merges and it becomes hard to read.