Recent experimental discoveries have brought a diverse set of broken symmetry states to the center stage of research on cuprate superconductors. Here, we focus on a thematic understanding of the diverse phenomenology by exploring a strong-coupling mechanism of symmetry breaking driven by frustration of antiferromagnetic (AFM) order. We achieve this through a variational study of a three-band model of the CuO2 plane with Kondo type exchange couplings between doped oxygen holes and classical copper spins. Two main findings from this strong-coupling multi-band perspective are (1) that the symmetry hierarchy of spin stripe, charge stripe, intra-unit-cell nematic order and isotropic phases are all accessible microscopically within the model, (2) many symmetry-breaking patterns compete with energy differences within a few meV per Cu atom to produce a rich phase diagram. These results indicate that the diverse phenomenology of broken-symmetry states in hole-doped AFM charge-transfer insulators may indeed arise from hole-doped frustration of antiferromagnetism. © 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.