Words come out of your brain as ideas concepts and emotions, get translated by your mouth into sounds, and enter someone else, as those sounds, where they are translated into ideas concepts and emotions that are familiar to their brain. there is absolutely no guarantee these are even remotely the same.
Quite a lot of the time however the meaning translates just fine. Language is great that way, it establishes guidelines for those words, what they mean, and if you share a language with someone you generally share the ideas and concepts part. The emotions associated with each word however are almost entirely related to personal experience. Assuming most hypnosis is done on people who have at least some shared experiences means that you can however use words to recall specific emotions which are common. A beach is relaxing, a line at a hospital is stressful, being at school without underwear is shameful and being surrounded by good friends is comforting. There are exceptions but those are rare.
Using these ideas once you have a certain level of rapport (a type of interpersonal trust, something for another post) hypnosis can proceed very easily by creating metaphoric connections between emotions you want to draw out, and a situation that normally would not have any connection to those emotions. Walking down stairs is not necesarily relaxing, but if you tell the subject to imagine one step being slightly relaxing, the word "relaxing" draws that emotional connection albeit weakly. The concept of stairs is then used to imply that if one stair is relaxing the next is more, and so on, and an entire flight of stairs, why thats a huge amount of relaxation now isnt it. Once you learn to construct hypnotic metaphores, the possibilities begin to really open up. the key is, using the initial connection to create a weak emotional association, and the metaphore to navigate through that association, increasing / decreasing / moving / changing the emotion at hand.
Metaphors are simply one of the easiest and more effective trance tools you can use.
One common pitfall is to be too specific in your metaphor, saying to your hypnotic subject that they are "going down a staircase" in your mind could mean "I want you to see a black staircase with a hand railing that you're going down into with a dark end that hopefully feels good as you are stepping down" ... in their mind it could mean "go down a set of metal stairs leading into a park" This can lead to problems later on where you tell them to look down the hallway and they suddenly have to shift their imagery from their sunny park to a dark hallway. This obviously can lead to misconceptions. A good way around this is to ask periodic questions, how does it feel to walk down, what do you see, what do you hear, and most importantly re-connect the emotional goal with the metaphor "these details make you feel more and more X dont they now"
Anyways that's all for now, I know this is not a complete guide, more of a simple overview and slight breakdon of a tool.
I'm available for chat on various IM if there are those of you interested in one on ones.
