  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 order. We achieve this through a variational study of a
three-band model of the CuO$_2$ 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 antiferromagnetic
charge-transfer insulators may indeed arise from hole-doped frustration of
antiferromagnetism.
